Examples Of Oppression In The Yellow Wallpaper

  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality.  This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she

This yellow wallpaper is described by the narrator as grotesque and irritating, which mirrors her own self image and confusion on what she is feeling. As this narrator begins to study the patterns, Gilman first personifies the wallpaper through dark and gruesome actions the character is seeing within it, revealing the fragile mental state of this woman. The narrator sees what is characterized as “...lame uncertain curves…[that] suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroying themselves in unheard of contradictions,” (Gilman 648). Later as the narrator becomes more consumed within the wallpaper that confines her, she starts to see human features “...where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at [her] upside down,” (Gilman 649). This counterpart of herself does not show the delicate and ethereal woman she is expected to be; it shows an opposite and somewhat appalling image of what she is beginning to come to terms with.

The woman behind this work of literature portrays the role of women in the society during that period of time. "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a well written story describing a woman who suffers from insanity and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The author uses her own experience to criticize male domination of women during the nineteenth century. Although the story was written fifty years ago, "The Yellow Wallpaper" still brings a clear message how powerless women were during that time.

Traditionally, men have held the power in society. Women have been treated as a second class of citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Feminist criticism contends that literature either supports society’s patriarchal structure or provides social criticism in order to change this hierarchy. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts one women’s struggle against the traditional female role into which society attempts to force her and the societal reaction

How does John lead the narrator to her state of oppression? John has been treating his wife cruelly. By the cruel treatment, it’s not physical abuse, but mental abuse. The mental abuse is not cursing or name calling, but an unusual way to treat a wife. Most of the time, John demeaned her and her rights as a human being by treating her like a child.

She explained this in Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper. After the loss of her child she admits she suffered from a sort of mental breakdown but never had any sort of hallucinations. The actual yellow wallpaper in the story was described to be hideous just as her situation was. This ugly situation “the wallpaper” is what had her trapped and she felt she need to free herself by tarring it down. The nursery room she was staying in resembled her being stuck in a period of morning for the lose of her child. Her doctor at the time and the doctor in the story was of the male gender along with the males being the ones that told her what to do and what was wrong with her and how to feel symbolizes how she felt oppressed by men and how other women in society did as well. This oppressing lead her to seeing the women in the wallpaper. She felt the need to free this woman and capture her because she initially wanted to free herself from the situation as well as find herself and her dignity

The act of tearing off the wallpaper and exclaiming, "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (p. 29) is the most symbolic installment of the narrative. It reveals that the main character has finally accepted herself as a relevant woman who must not be tied down by society's standards and refused to allow others to suck her back into the life of dependency and

There is an underlying connection between the frontal pattern of the wallpaper trapping the woman and the physical, mental and emotional limitations set on the narrator. Anxiety and depression are difficult to verbally describe, so Gilman purposely describes the evolution of the wallpaper to symbolize what is mentally happening in the narrator’s head. Originally the narrator may have felt confused and disturbed, similar to the “sprawling flamboyant patterns… dull enough to confuse the eye… pronounced enough to constantly irritate” that is originally projected by the wallpaper (Gilman 793). As her depression and insanity increase, the wallpaper gains movement and takes a human form. Once the narrator reveals that the moving form behind the paper is a woman, the reader establishes a parallel between the two

Throughout history and cultures today, women have been beaten, verbally abused, and taught to believe they have no purpose in life other than pleasing a man. Charlotte Perkins Gillam uses her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a weapon to help break down the walls surrounding women, society has put up. This story depicts the life of a young woman struggling with postpartum depression, whose serious illness is overlooked, by her physician husband, because of her gender. Gillman 's writing expresses the feelings of isolation, disregarded, and unworthiness the main character Jane feels regularly. This analysis will dive into the daily struggles women face through oppression, neglect, and physical distinction; by investigating each section

The idea was that women were too fragile and sometimes needed to just rest their poor little minds by doing nothing. This treatment leads her to be fascinated with the wallpaper in her room. It was just old yellow wallpaper at first, but as time went on she began to create delusions that the wallpaper trapped the women who stay there, stealing their souls and strangling them if they try to get out. The narrator was, according to Weir’s rest cure, to get much better after her stay and would be loving her baby to no end. However, her mind went from functional to

At the beginning of the story the woman says, “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (657). After being locked in this room without anything to do, the woman becomes fascinated with the wallpaper. While staring at the wallpaper the narrator sees a desperate woman trying to escape from a cage. This symbolizes the narrator being trapped in a room and in a domestic lifestyle. The domestic lifestyle has the man placed above the woman and hence superior.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates the physical as well as the mental deterioration of the narrator, who is the archetype of female social oppression, during

The women in American society of today are much more well treated then the women in the 1800s. Women now are able to raise a family on their own with a house, a full time job, able to vote, and participate in government. But back during the 1800s in the United States, women had nothing like that; they were only able to rely on their husband for support, while they stay at home and take care of the children of the household. Charlotte Perkins Stetson the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper" gives a perspective through the eyes of a mentally unstable wife of an oppressive authoritarian husband. Giving the story the main themes which would be sexism and oppression.

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.