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Use Of Point Of View In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Point of View in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses an interesting means in which to allow the reader into the mind of the narrator: a woman who conforms under the pressures of not only society but also her husband. The narrator experiences a mental break after struggling with the urge to rebel against expectations placed on her to be an ordinary, healthy woman and not what she really is: a woman suffering postpartum depression at a time when postpartum was not considered a legitimate condition. Gilman manipulates her usage of the point of view -having the story told through a journal, having the perspective as first person, and having the breakdown of …show more content…

When reading a story, readers can often find themselves relating to the characters and feeling what they are experiencing. Gilman achieved this connection between reader and narrator through her use of personal pronouns. The personal pronouns used throughout the story, such as “I”, “me” and “we”, when opposed to having emotions explained through the distance of a third-person point of view, help the reader understand the struggle the narrator goes through. For instance, in the sentence, “I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him” (Gilman 655), this is the narrator’s ultimate form of rebellion; she is locking her husband out of the room that he has kept her confined to. Gilman puts the narrator’s own thoughts into the readers minds through her use of “I”, instead of having them watch the narrator enter this state of rebellion through third-person “she”, so the reader could feel the narrators the desire to rebel. If in the case where the usage of personal pronouns does not put the reader in the mental state of the narrator, the second advantage of using first-person perspective is that it makes it seem as if the narrator revealing her personal thoughts to us, which elicits sympathy from the reader. This revealing of personal thought is seen specifically when the narrator writes, “And I'll tell you why - privately ­- I've seen her! (Gilman 655). The narrator is referring the shapes she is seeing moving around in the wallpaper in her room. She has begun to, at this point, see a “woman stooping down and creeping behind the pattern” (Gilman 652) but has not mentioned this to her husband out of fear of causing him grief with her “silly fancies”(Gilman 652). The woman becomes real in the narrator’s head, and instead of telling her husband, she reveals of this

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