Stigma In The Yellow Wallpaper

Days turn into weeks, and after still being exposed to this particular yellow wallpaper, she stars having more severe hallucinations. Every time she looks at the wallpaper, she sees a woman inside it, shaking and moving the walls as if she is trying to escape away from it. Gilman uses the image of this trapped woman inside the wallpaper as a way to express the incarceration of women at her time. By looking at the story from this point of view and analyzing the woman trying to leave the wallpaper, Gilman expresses the revolutionary movement that was going on at the time, using the narrator as a symbol of the whole female society. One critic describes “And in identifying with and freeing both the woman and that part of herself trapped by her patriarchal world, the narrator finds a measure of freedom” (Golden 53). This passage represents Gilman’s society and the struggle that women had go through in order to escape a world dominated by a male society.

During this time, she notes she has become increasingly fond of the yellow wallpaper but, bizarrely, informs the reader she is fond of John, who is “so wise and loves me so”. The fondness of both husband and wallpaper represents the oppression of her wants. Her husband forbids her from doing many things, such as working or being in companionship with friends, but the room itself encloses her, alone, in the attic with the wallpaper. Much of the patriarchal debate occurs as the highly regarded doctor does not listen to his wife’s comments and demands, and his presence beside her dwindles the longer they occupy the

The emotions inside of her need to get out and her so called psychologist is forcing her to keep them in. The men in this time did not understand why a woman would ever want to do anything but stay in the home and the fact that she didn’t meant she was going or already insane. They forced her into domesticity until it eventually drove her mad. She begins to obsess over the wallpaper and the woman trapped inside. While no one is watching, for fear of getting into trouble for her foolish actions, she peels the wallpaper slowly to help the woman escape. She acts so normal when the husband is around just like a puppet. Pretending to be the prefect housewife and mother he has expected her to be all along. The wallpaper design is a metaphor for the men in society keeping women in their accepted role in life in the nineteenth century. Gilman especially wanted out of this role and wanted to show the way for the rest of women who were stranded in these roles, like she was.

In her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expresses exasperation towards the separate male and female roles expected of her society, and the evident repressed rights of a woman versus the active duties of a man. The story depicts the methods taken to cure a woman of her psychological state during Gilman’s time, and delineates the dominant cure of the time period, “the resting cure,” which encouraged the restraint of the imagination ("The Yellow Wallpaper: Looking Beyond the Boundaries") Gilman uses the unnamed narrator to represent the average repressed woman of her time and how her needs were neglected in an attempt to mark a fixed distinction between the standards and expectations of men and women. John, the narrator’s husband, take the designated and patriarchal role of a man who believes he knows everything there is to know about the human mind. His belief of his superior knowledge pushes him to condescend, overshadow, and misunderstand his wife. As a result, his wife loses control of her life and escapes into her own fantasy world, where she is able dominate her imagination, free her mind, and fall into insanity. Gilman describes her era’s approach toward female psychology in order to criticize the patriarchal society she lived in as well as to reveal its effects on the women of her time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and shows how it changes one’s life forever.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression, undergoing the sexist psychological treatments of mental health, that took place during the late nineteenth century. The narrator in Gilman’s story writes about being forced to do nothing, and how that she feels that is the worst possible treatment for her. In this particular scene, the narrator writes that she thinks normal work would do her some good, and that writing allows her to vent, and get across her ideas that no one seems to listen to. Gilman’s use of the rhetorical appeal pathos, first-person point of view, and forceful tone convey her message that confinement is not a good cure for mental health, and that writing,

Forced to lie in bed all day and take it easy, the narrator becomes obsessed by the wallpaper and is drawn into trying to interpret it. She imagines a woman trapped within the paper. The narrator decides to strip off all of the wallpaper in her room, this is the moment of ultimate rebellion for the protagonist, and she is taking action towards independence. When John comes home to find the door locked, he begins freaking out. When he finally gets into the bedroom the narrator’s actions are so extraordinary and shocking that her husband faints. Through everything that is going on the narrator keeps creeping around the room in circles stripping all of the wallpaper off to free the woman that is trapped within.

  “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.

Within the story, Gilman represents the domestic sphere as a prison(Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism). The narrator is considered to be in prison but in a nursery because she cannot handle her duties as a mother to watch her children or a wife to clean(Delashmit). The windows in the room symbolize the windows in a prison cell. She feels as though, since someone is behind the wallpaper, she is being watched(MacPike).

The narrator’s feelings of inferiority and powerlessness parallels the female figure she sees trapped behind the pattern in the wall-paper adorning her room. She gradually withdraws from both John and reality by locking herself in the room and ultimately merging with the figure. Through the changing image of the pattern from a “fait figure” (Gilman 46) to a “woman stooping” (Gilman 46) behind the paper and “shaking the bars” (Gilman 46) as if she wanted “to get out” (Gilman 46), we can see her becoming one with the figure: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.”(51) Her collapse into madness as reflected in her behavior with the “bedstead [that] is fairly gnawed” (Gilman 51) and her “creeping all around” (Gilman 50) is a direct result of her passive submissiveness to John’s control of her life.

Within “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman writes about a troubled, young woman in the late 19th century. The author uses setting to show how isolated and separated women were in the world during the 19th century, which is why gilman uses setting to not only show but express how the boundaries put around women drove them to insanity. The story starts off in “a colonial mansion…” that is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village (pg.2)” this shows how the house was very isolated and separate from society and so was the woman. The description given about the house seems to connect with the position of her life not only within the house but in society, which was filled with boundaries and restrictions. As the narrator goes on, she brings up the room itself as a ‘big, airy room… with windows that look all ways (pg.2) which is where the ideas of isolation and restriction becomes more evident.

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.

Kessler emphasizes the point that this one short story seemed parallel and mirror the views of Gilman in regards to the oppression of women in her society. Comparing the two, Kessler writes, “This once she was able to join her public and private expressions in a work of devastating impact” (Kessler 1991 p.159). Gilman, who was a leader and crusader in the women’s rights movement, tried to expel away the gender bias that plague women, just as the narrator in her story tries to pull off the wallpaper in her room to free the trapped women behind it. The patriarchal society at that time period was Gilman’s wallpaper. She had to work hard at trying to force through societal changes. Just like the resistant old wallpaper in her story, ridged and yellow with age, Gilman and her counterparts had much difficulty in pushing through the wallpaper of tradition.

Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman once said, ‘’There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver’’. Gilman’s belief that there’s no difference in means of mentality between men or women demonstrated through ‘’The Yellow Wallpaper’’. Gilman symbolically portrays that women suffer from psychological disorders caused by lack of love, care, and a constant pressure of secondary roles and personal unimportance in social life. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about a woman who has a mental illness but cannot heal due to her husband’s lack of belief. The story appears to take place during a time frame where women were oppressed. The short story can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and