Literary Analysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” depicts this by showing that Gilman manages to overcome the constraints of her husband and the doctor in order to be able to write and to become free.

Essentially, the wallpaper traps the narrator with its confusing and somewhat enchanting pattern, and it is this image that becomes important: for Gilman, society’s repression of women is exactly as the wallpaper. It, too, is an indecipherable and repellent pattern, which confines women to their houses. Societal convention traps women behind its bars, just as the wallpaper trapped the

Towards the end of the story the narrator has a complete mental breakdown and goes insane. The story ends when John, the narrator's husband, faints when he enters his wife's room, because he is greatly disturbed when he finds her "creeping" around and becoming one of the figures behind the wallpaper. The Yellow Wallpaper can be interpreted on a personal level by associating it with the author. Gilman suffered from nervous breakdowns and depression because she was told to live a very plain life as best as she could by a specialist in nervous diseases.

The wallpaper in the former nursey is an integral to the story, as the plot progresses the woman becomes consumed with trying to understand its nuances. The woman said she “had never saw a worse paper in [her] life,” going on to describe the paper’s pattern as “constantly irritating” and the color as repellant and revolting (Gilman 318). As the madness festers in the woman, she begins to see a shadowy form creeping around the wallpaper. It appears that there is a woman stuck behind the pattern, which the woman says form bars like jail cells at nighttime. The trapped woman is symbolic of how the author feels trapped by stigmas surrounding mental illness in women at the time of publication. The window is also a crucial feature to the story because as the lighting changes, so does the woman in the wallpaper. During the day she is stagnant or immobile, similar to how the woman is coerced into going on bedrest by her husband and lies awake in her bed all day. At night, however, the woman in the wallpaper is constantly moving or shaking her patterned prison, just as the woman likes to creep around at night instead of resting as she is supposed to. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses multiple aspects of the setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a way to convey the characters emotions, free of the bias of the woman’s internal struggle of needing to “get better” found in her writing.

The short story The Yellow Wallpaper, was used by the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman to bring awareness of the experiences of depression and the rest cure both mentally, physically, and socially in the 1800s and early 1900s. Suffering from post-partum depression herself, Gilman also went under treatment of the rest cure. As a result, her experiences and struggles are very similar to the ones of her main character in the story. While narrating The Yellow Paper, the main character and Gilman herself identify numerous reasons why the rest cure has numerous faults and isn’t the best method for this crippling mental disease.

Gilman’s opinion about domesticity did not just stop with the novel The Yellow Wallpaper she continued to voice her opinion in her other novels. Although The Yellow Wallpaper is more of a story that she uses to tell her feelings, some of her other novels are more specific and opinionated. For instance, her novel The Home, published in 1900, goes into more detail about how women need economic independence to improve motherhood, marriage, and industry. She emphasizes how women need to get out of the home and go out and pursue something different in their lives. Gilman believes that liberation is needed for women, children, and men. In other words Gilman not only believes that women should have the rights to express themselves but that men and children deserve that right as well. This shows that she believes in equality for all. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, she focuses more on the right of women to express themselves and to not be labeled as a housewife. For instance, one of Gilman’s most famous quotes is, “A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband”(Siegel). This quote further proves what Gilman is trying to say in her novels. More specifically, a house needs both a husband and wife, as in they should both be considered equal. Charolette Gilman uses her novels and immense belief to spread to

At the beginning of the story, Gilman reminds readers that the story is a diary explaining Jane’s internal journey. The story demonstrates two different worlds. These two worlds include Jane’s developing imaginative insight and her husband and sister-in-law’s world of domestic control and masculine order. Through confinement Jane was forced to stay in the nursery and fall into her psychotic fears. Jane was placed under the rest cure, and pushed to give up her job as a mother. Gilman herself was placed under the rest cure which creates a connection between her and Jane. It is later known that the story was created to show a heroine struggling to save herself through writing. After being confined for so long, Jane slowly identifies with her suppressed rage. When she illustrates the image of the woman in the wallpaper being behind bars, Jane connects this with her own feelings of entrapment. When she finally destroys the wallpaper, Jane expresses her rage. Through this expression Jane found that the only source of power should could achieve was through the

Unfamiliar with Gilman or her work, it wasn’t until after reading the story and then researching the author, that I came to appreciate and understand the story’s full message. I had been taken aback by the comments and actions of the narrator’s domineering and sexist husband but reminded myself of the historical context, the piece was written 125 years ago. At that time in the U.S., gender equality was in its infancy if that. Many states still did not allow married women to retain their earnings or own property (Milligan, 2017).

In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her personal experiences with depression to create a powerful short story. Gilman indirectly wrote about her postpartum depression treatment. She used her personal experiences to write a story so disturbing that it can even make you feel like you are a losing it just reading it. Gilman’s and the wife’s life are so similar that it makes the story even more thrilling.

Through the use of the journal format she is calling attention to the problems of madness this solution actually caused instead of helping the women get through the illness. She also points out that the man of the house was always in complete control over the women’s lives. The women talked, dressed, acted, and did whatever the man said was the right thing for them to do even if they did not entirely agree. Gilman is essentially pointing out everything that was wrong with the way women were treated by society, even more in depth how a husband was able to treat his wife as if she was inferior to him. She used this way of formatting so that the reader can see everything through the narrator’s eyes and her emotions of how many women felt at that

Through the expectations and values of women in the nineteenth century, Gilman is able to portray the reason for the narrator’s “hysteria”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s husband seems to belittle most of her statements. In her essay, critic Rula Quawas suggests that the

The narrator's journey in The Yellow Wallpaper allows for Gilman to use her perspective to further illustrate the link between seclusion and prohibition of self expression to a loss of touch with reality, by portraying the narrator's thoughts as they began to float away from their grounding in reality in response to having dealt with isolation and not being able to properly express herself for a considerable amount of

The melding of the trapped woman behind the wallpaper and the narrator could represent the eventual understanding of that, of how she is viewed by both society and her husband, causing her mind to shatter with the revelation. The other point Gilman wanted to make was that self-expression is not just for men. The restriction of imagination and ideas in women can only end badly, as it did for the narrator and nearly for Gilman

The time period Gilman was born in the late 1800’s, which during this era of time women were seen as lesser than men, as it had always been even before this current time. Women were expected of nothing more than to produce a family for their husband, staying at home to maintain and care for their families, and take the position of school teachers. Even with having a job as a school teacher, there were still many rules and regulations as to what specifically

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is told from the perspective of an obedient wife, who is denied adequate treatment of her serious mental illness. An issue that Gilman knew from her own nervous breakdown and ineffective treatment she was given. This story is considered her greatest piece of fiction because of its horrifying depictions and its bleak outlook (Great American Stories 81). After it was first published in 1892, many interpreted the story only as a horror tale, but year’s later critics have attached many themes and symbolism to the short story. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Gilman uses a descriptive first person point of view to not only immerse readers into the deranged mind of her horrified character, but to also