Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper

The wallpaper magnifies the problems the narrator is experiencing. The pattern in the wallpaper is not just an innocent pattern for a children's room as it is first introduced to the reader, but rather it has a mind-numbing quality that readily attracts the projections of the unbalanced mind.

When Jane describes the wallpaper, she is first repulsed by its color and the mere sight of it. Later, she describes that the sunlight reveals a “pointless pattern”

While the narrator describes what she calls a nursery type bedroom with barred windows and rings on the wall her ancestral home, the audience soon realizes that this is her bedroom in an old insane asylum. She stares for long periods at this patchy yellow wallpaper around her room. She thinks that the boys who previously lived in this home ripped the paper down the sides

Though it is a controversial topic, gender has always played a tremendous role in society. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores gender roles, including the role of the main character. During the 1890’s, when the story was set, men oversaw the household, and the women had to take care of the house and children. In addition, women, including the main character, had to listen to their husbands. In the story, the main character is controlled because she is a woman, and this drives her to feeling confined.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has several major themes that were expressed. In the nineteenth century, women were responsible for doing house chores, taking care of the kids, and obeying their husbands. A general concern regarding women’s inequality during the 19th century was painted by Gilman. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman emphasizes the concerns in which society discouraged the women’s ability to self express themselves. Does the narrator listen to the man because he’s a physician or because he is her husband?

The author chose diction to portray the husband as a controlling man to represent the inequality women felt in marriages in the nineteenth century. John, the husband and physician of the sick woman, downplayed the severity of his wife’s illness which, made her illness intensify.

In addition, the narrator shows signs of insanity by her having hallucinations. While she is staring at the wallpaper she sees people and objects appear ON the wall in the wallpaper. At first she just describes the wallpaper as if a boy’s school used it. She notices every tiny defect in the wallpaper, she notices the tiny little scratches that not everybody will be able to see. Throughout the story the narrator was letting the paper get the best of her so John did not repaper the wall although he wanted to. Obvious signs of insanity were when the

In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses this story give a voice to the women that were dealing with oppression from men. Women during the time when this story was written were almost exclusively under the dominance of males. They were mainly house wives, and did what the male forced them to do. Many women were working in the house, and not allowed to leave, consequently making them lonely and depressed. Because of this, women were not as educated as men were, and did not have the power to do what they wanted to accomplish. The narrator is locked into an upstairs room with this wallpaper that she describes as “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight”( p.480) . The color yellow means “the color of sickness” The wallpaper symbolizes her oppression.

She describes the wallpaper as “dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate” (Gilman). The narrator is not thinking much about the wallpaper and she is only briefly annoyed by it. “This wallpaper has a kind of

Furthermore it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to discern what the truth actually is because as the story progresses it becomes apparent that the narrator is an unreliable one. Throughout the story one of the biggest causes for the woman’s frustration and unease is the yellow wallpaper in her room. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and slowly allows it to drive her closer to insanity because of other people’s reluctance to acknowledge her opinions and mental illness. At the beginning the young woman simply harbours a strong dislike for the wallpaper as shown by her portrayal of it when she first sees it. The young woman describes it as being “repellant, almost revolting”(649) and mentions that she “never saw a worse paper in [her] life” (648). However, after a while, the young woman begins to refer to the wallpaper as almost a living, breathing entity and allows it to consume her thoughts without ever letting her husband know what is happening. This disturbing behaviour is evident once she begins to see shapes and eyes moving about inside the paper “up and down and sideways” (650) and feels as though she cannot escape because “those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere” (650). Finally it all becomes too much for the woman to handle and she begins to experience full fledged hallucinations. “The front pattern

Throughout the story the narrator is obsessed with the wallpaper, it seems that she has

The first sentence of “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives insight to the setting of the story and essential

The protagonist describes her changing perception of the wallpaper; “At night, in any kind of light…it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (Gilman 82). Through the expository level of reading, it can be assumed that the woman is an image that the protagonist created for herself. Her attempts at freeing the woman from behind the wallpaper could symbolize her desire to free herself from the situation she is in, and the marriage that she is trapped in. However, the effectiveness of this is dulled as it is only a

Gender inequality is an issue that has been relevant throughout our history yet only became a true fight near the start of the 20th century. Men and women have different roles that they are forced to play in society. Men are seen as the money maker in the family, and women are seen as the homemaker with a less important role. Men were respected and seen as superior to women. The fight for gender equality has challenged these traditional roles that have been assigned. The roles that women play in society have changed now in the 21st Century, but not without a little help. Influential writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Steinbeck have helped pave the way for equal right through their powerful literature. Gilman and Steinbeck