Commentary on Charlotte Perkin Gilman´s The Yellow Room Essay

Gilman is most renounced for her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Her life story became the basis of this story. After her first child, Gilman experienced severe depression and her doctor prescribed her with a rest cure. The doctor in the story is much like the doctor that Gilman was treated by in her life. She was also prevented from picking up a pen or brush, which symbolizes, using her intellect. She pulled back from the brink of insanity by ignoring the doctor's orders, leaving her husband…

of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman 19). Her husband faints and she keeps crawling over him. As you can see, the yellow wallpaper represents a different reality. It is “living paper”, aggressively alive (Treichler 191): You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream (Gilman 12). The narrator strongly resists the wallpaper…

life. He treats her like a child and just like a child she is kept in this room. Inside the room are "rings and things" that reminds her of a child's gymnasium. There is also a gate and at the top of the stairs and bars on the windows. These add on to her seclusion. When she tells her husband that the room she is being restricted to is probably not the best choice, considering the many other rooms in the estate, he is quick to dismiss her fears and plead with her to act "sanely"…

” This explains how she feels about herself, that something is wrong, she can feel it. These feelings are directly connected to oppositional nature of her husband. The rest of the story conveys in great detail the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper, it’s contribution to her depression. The wallpaper seems to represent the main character’s husband. “The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and…

pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion" (Gilman 429). Shortly after the passage above, there is another change in the mental state of the narrator. She begins to show symptoms of paranoia, another classic sign of schizophrenia. Speaking of how glad she is that her baby does not have to stay in the room with the yellow wallpaper, the narrator says "Of course I never mention it to them any more— I am too wise,— but I keep watch of it all the same" (Gilman 430). She again shows her mistrust of the…

to send images to the readers that it was expected attitudes in her society and was part of their culture which women were forced to follow. The yellow wallpaper in the room shows, symbolically, the narrator was being oppressed. The narrator hated the wallpaper because she saw herself as a prisoner of her own husband. Spending so much time in the room, the narrator studied the wallpaper in details and found the wallpaper somewhat represents her. "There is one place where two breadths didn't match…

the head of the stairs. The narrator writes, At first [John] meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. (Gilman 14) It is as if the bedroom is a bulwark that works to maintain the observer and…

husband's ill-advised attempts to treat his wife's symptoms drive her insane by taking all responsibility from her and forcing isolation upon her as a part of her "cure." Gilman emphasizes the wife's isolation by describing to the reader where the story is set. The retreat John takes his wife to in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a large, dilapidated Victorian mansion "quite three miles from the village" (470). It is surrounded by extensive…

she believes to be a former nursery. There is, however, strong evidence that the narrator is not the first mental patient to occupy the room. There are bars on the windows, gouges in the floor and walls, and rings fastened to the walls; the bed is bolted down and has been gnawed on, and the wallpaper has been torn off in patches. Confined to this room day after day, the narrator begins to study the wallpaper: ". . . I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless…

imagery and setting helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The unnamed protagonist in this story suffers from a nervous disorder which is enhanced by her feeling of being trapped within a room. The setting of the vast colonial mansion and particularly the nursery room with barred windows provides an image of loneliness and seclusion experienced by the protagonist. This is also again portrayed in the description of the garden and the uses of extended metaphors,…