Symbolic Orders In The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a woman who is living in a new house with her husband and baby, she writes in her journal about the yellow wallpaper and events taking place in her life. The author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys a message using symbolism about the oppression of women during this time period. We can see the symbolism being used in the yellow wallpaper, the characters Journal, and her mental breakdown, which help to illustrate the common themes of this story, such as, oppression and feeling trapped in the roles that are set by society.

jane feels as though she is the woman in the wallpaper so no one else would understand the things she sees “There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will.”. and she hates the fact that it reminds her of herself this woman who is “stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit.” Trapped and suffocating like this hunched back woman without a voice to escape her prison bars that she hates so much. Just as jane is trapped in the small room with the discolored yellow

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a startling representation of 19th century gender inequality and how it affected women in their marriages. It illustrates the way women of the 19th century were treated as subordinates in their relationships with men, and the negative psychological side effects this often had. The narrator, who remains nameless throughout the story, finds herself trapped in the bedroom of her new home, encouraged to stay there by her husband and sister-in-law to treat her apparent depression, which she refers to as a “nervous” condition. The distracting yellow wallpaper in the room becomes the focal point of the

Her husband is a physician named John. He is practical in the extreme. John believes deeply "temporary nervous depression" is the best treatment for his wife. He made this decision without discussing about the treatment with his wife. He did everything for his wife that

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates the patriarchy and the treatment of women in society during the nineteenth century. This is evident through two parts. First, one sees the treatment of women directly through the narrator’s interaction with her doctor and husband, John. Finally, it is clear through the symbolic wallpaper as well as other physical characteristics of the room that’s she is trapped by societal norms of the time both physically and symbolically. The wallpaper is especially important as it acts as an explicit visual representation of the narrator’s realization of the true nature of her status in society as a woman. One can see what it was like to be a woman during this era of male dominance. “The Yellow Wallpaper” question gender roles and societal conventions at the time by showing how a woman who believes she is being held down, or oppressed, is considered to be suffering from a mental illness.

As stated before, the main character and narrator of the story, “Jane Doe”, has been confined in this house, where she chooses to mainly stay in her own room, in order to suppress her mental illness. Although the narrator claims she is improving day by day, readers can identify that she is indeed only getting crazier in spite of “the women” she sees behind the yellow wallpaper. The narrator fights the realization that the predicament of the woman in the wallpaper is a symbolic version of her own situation. The readers are compelled to determine from the narrator’s distraught writing style that there is not in deed a woman trapped in the wallpaper; the narrator just assumes there is as a result of losing her grip on reality. In a short fiction novel, two authors state that, “The creeping figure behind the paper trying to break through is the narrator’s double, and, as the narrator’s anger and hostility towards her husband gradually surface in the text so she assists the

In The Yellow Wallpaper we see incarceration not only in the narrator’s house, but also the narrator’s house represents patriarchal conditions for women outside of the home. An example of the first level of incarceration is when the narrator says that the summer house is isolated because it is far from her regular house and surroundings. The summer house is an essential component for Jane’s rest from her depression, but she is not allowed to go outside. As John , her husband, comes, goes, and stays in town to attend to his patients, the freedom of the narrator is restricted. While he is out doing his business, she should only sleep and not leave her room. In addition, Jane’s second imprisonment is that she is restricted in her choice of which room in her home she should be in. For example, when she talks about the “room upstairs,” she insists on moving to the fourth floor from the bottom floor. However, John tells her to sleep in the nursery upstairs with the barred windows. The “barred windows” show her choices are restricted. Another level of imprisonment is in the mind of the narrator. This is represented by the symbol of the image of the woman trapped in the external wallpaper. The narrator recognizes that the woman in the wallpaper is in a cage, but she wants to escape. Then the narrator sees herself in the same

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story of a woman 's psychological breakdown, which is shown through an imaginative conversation with the wallpaper. The relationship between the female narrator and the wallpaper reveals the inner condition of the narrator and also symbolically shows how women are oppressed in society. The story, read through a feminist lens, reflects a woman 's struggle against the patriarchal power structure. In the “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the wallpaper as a symbol of the social and economic repression of the 19th century woman and her struggle to free herself. The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as an expression of the narrator’s deteriorating mental state, the “pattern” of social and economic dependence, which reduces women to domestic slavery and as a symbol of regression or restraints.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a marvelous fiction piece that does not have a concrete ending, leaving the reader's freedom to create a suitable denouement. The novella begins with a woman who is suffering from postpartum depression. She endures thoughts and experiences that may be out of touch from reality due to her altered brain chemistry. Her husband plays an important role in the novella by conveying oppression through his actions.

She knows that she is expressing a sickness that is not normal. John’s wife has post-partum depression. This has led her to insanity before she was locked into the house and forced to never read, write, or see her precious child. John instead diagnoses his wife with Temporary Nervous Depression. She reports “exhaustion, crying, nervousness, synesthesia, anger, paranoia, and hallucination.” When this story was written, it was common for women with depression to be locked up and forbidden to do things, such as read, write, or even work. Without reading or writing, she becomes fixated on the only thing available to her – the yellow wallpaper; “she locks herself in the room and succeeds in stripping off most of the remaining paper.” Slowly, while being locked up in the room, the yellow wallpaper starts to come alive. She begins seeing patterns behind the paper, but not only patterns; she starts to see herself. In this case, leaving the unnamed women all by herself at home without socializing with the real world, is driving her insane, along with crazy hallucinations and delusional

Gender roles have been a common subject that the author's use to convey their own perspective views on the female role in the society. This is the situation in both short fictions of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that emphasize the nineteenth-century traditional marriage, feeling of exclusion, and the image, and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, that reveals themes of how the women should behave, power of domesticity, and sexuality. It is clear that these two stories incorporate aspects of their similarities about women's roles, societal standings, and personal identity were totally controlled by the society created by men that is anticipated to behave as a feminine ideal in their own separate times.

The setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” plays a critical role in understanding the story, specifically in the progression of the main character’s psychological illness. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes her room as such:

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story edited based on the author’s own experience. She fell into depression after giving birth to her daughter, and she was treated by her doctor with his famous treatment “rest cure”. Gilman described in her autobiography, the treatment drove her insane, and her thoughts were ignored by her doctor and her husband, which was identical to Jane’s situation. The feminine characters in the story represent the general condition of women in the late-nineteenth-century society. As a female writer, she used her personal experience to create a story which embodies the thoughts on life and society from a feminist perspective. At the beginning of the story, Jane was diagnosed with mild depression, her husband- John; the man has strong confidence in his medical skills, sent her to an ancestral house for the popular depression treatment “rest cure” regardless of her own advice. The house is a hereditary estate, located miles from the village, elegant environment with fresh air, and magnificent high rents, but also appears desolated. For John, he thinks it is the ideal place for Jane to get on her treatment, for which he did not hesitate to pay the rent for three months to observe the efficacy of the treatment. The room John chooses for Jane is a spacious and bright room, designed specifically for recuperation purposes. The room is surrounded with yellow wallpaper, which Jane hates at first

Jane lives in a room that can be compared to a prison cell and she is very dissatisfied with her surroundings. she begs her husband for the walls to be repaired and for the wall-paper to be changed. It is again proven that women are oppressed by men when John Replied to her wishes with, “that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on” (Gillman). In this quote it shows just how prison like Jane’s room is and despite her dissatisfaction with it, her husband continues to deny her wishes. Gillman continues to use Janes surroundings as symbolism by having Jane state, “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” regarding the wallpaper (Gillman). The wallpaper has become a symbolism of the mental prison Jane has created for herself. Jane is completely captivated by the paper and begins to imagine a woman trapped behind the paper; a representation of Jane herself. This is proven to be true because she is not freed from her thoughts until she had torn down the

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the author uses the conventions of the psychological horror tale to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially as practiced by the “respectable” classes of her time. For the author, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of a woman and the “active” work of a man, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this division in gender had the effect of keeping women in a state of ignorance and preventing their full development. John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she retreats into her obsessive fantasy, the only place she can retain some control and exercise the power of her mind. The mental constraints placed upon the narrator, even more so than the physical ones, are what ultimately drive her insane. She is forced to hide her anxieties and fears to preserve the appearance of a happy marriage and to make it appear that she is winning the fight against her depression. From the beginning, the most intolerable aspect of her treatment is the compulsory silence and idleness of the “resting cure.” She is forced to become completely passive, forbidden from exercising her mind in any way. Writing is especially off limits, and John warns her several times that she must use her self-control to rein in her imagination, which he fears will run away with her. Of course, the narrator’s eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not the expression of it. She is constantly longing for an emotional and intellectual outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal, which she describes more than once as a “relief” to her mind. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a mind that is already plagued with anxiety can deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and kept from healthy work. The