Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper

  “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.

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.

The Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a great expression of women’s oppression in the 19th century. The story introduces readers to a woman frustrating in her life and suffering from a nervous depression and her marriage as the yellow wallpaper is causing her a real insanity. Having a background about the timing and the setting that the story is written in helps the reader to internalize the whole meaning of the story and understand its important details. The story is told by a narrator using an anxious tone, and she is being angry and sarcastic at the same time. The woman mentions that her husband has taken her to a summer vacation. So, the story takes

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.

It was commonly casted that women during the 19th century were not to go beyond their domestic spheres. If a woman were to go beyond the norms and partake in a “male” activity and not assign to “womanly” duties, it were to take an ill effect on her, because she was designed to act merely as a mother, wife, and homemaker. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, demonstrates the status of women in the 19th century within society, revealing that madness in this story stems from the oppressive control of gender on woman. A woman who is trying to escape from confinement may result in madness. The use of madness characterizes women as victims of society, suffering the effects of isolation brought on by oppression driving

The structure of the text, particularly evident in the author’s interactions with her husband, reveals the binary opposition between the façade of a middle-class woman living under the societal parameters of the Cult of Domesticity and the underlying suffering and dehumanization intrinsic to marriage and womanhood during the nineteenth century. While readers recognize the story for its troubling description of the way in which the yellow wallpaper morphs into a representation of the narrator’s insanity, the most interesting and telling component of the story lies apart from the wallpaper. “The Yellow Wallpaper” outwardly tells the story of a woman struggling with post-partum depression, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman snakes expressions of the true inequality faced within the daily lives of nineteenth century women throughout the story. Although the climax certainly surrounds the narrator’s overpowering obsession with the yellow wallpaper that covers the room to which her husband banished her for the summer, the moments that do not specifically concern the wallpaper or the narrator’s mania divulge a deeper and more powerful understanding of the torturous meaning of womanhood.

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

For centuries women in literature have been depicted as weak, subservient, and unthinking characters. Before the 19th century, they usually were not given interesting personalities and were always the proper, perfect and supportive character to the main manly characters. However, one person, in order to defy and mock the norm of woman characterization and the demeaning mindsets about women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." This story, through well crafted symbolisms, brought to surface the troubles that real women face. Her character deals with the feeling of being trapped by the expectations of her husband, with the need to do something creative or constructive, and to have a mind and will of her own. These feelings

Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” centers around a woman who is dealing with a serious mental condition. In the story readers see different themes, symbols, and metaphors that are portrayed throughout the book. The madness aspect, society and class, freedom, and treatments all are different themes and symbols that the author uses throughout the story. Society and class play a big role in the story. Society is much different in the 1950s apart from how it is today.

Although, Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, contains numerous symbols, the yellow wallpaper of its title emerges as the most dramatic symbol. The seemingly, harmless yellow wallpaper in the narrator's room takes on a larger than life obsession for the story's narrator. On a basic level, the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator's mental decline. Initially, she feels the unsightliness of the tattered yellow wallpaper is annoying and aesthetically unpleasing. She reveals her aversion to the wallpaper when she describes the pattern as, “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (648). However, as her mental state deteriorates, her repulsion toward the yellow wallpaper heightens. In her worsening mental

The narrator in the start of the story is only slightly insane. She believes she is being cared for by John and that her case is nothing more than temporary. As the story progresses she becomes more secretive and even begins to questions John’s true intention. Then in the later part of the story she begins to stop trusting John and sees people in the yellow wallpaper. By her not realizing how bad her case is she makes her case even worse. The same can be said for the progression of the deterioration of the wallpaper. In the beginning it is described as “...revolting and an unclean yellow.” Around the time where her case begins to get more serious the wallpaper to the narrator is like a labyrinth and puzzle of lines. Each very complex with structure and meaning. With the end of the story the wallpaper is torn in all places and scratched up. The wallpaper didn’t start this way. The narrator describes it as trapping and how she was the one to solve

In the “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are many of literary techniques that illustrates the theme to express the story. Irony, imagery and symbolism are some literary devices that is presented among the story.  “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 acceptance and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The story appears to take place during a time where women were oppressed. Women were treated as if they were under one’s thumb in society during this period which is approximately the 19th century.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman also used symbolism to show how the married woman was trapped in her married and wanted freedom. “There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word.” (Gilman, 1899). This quotes shows how the women felt trapped in her married and that she had no rights in her marriage. Her husband treated her like a child more than a wife. Due to mentally feeling trapped, the woman made a connection with the old wallpaper in her room. The old wallpaper was a symbol of her wanting to be set free.The symbolism shows how the woman realized she is stuck in her marriage and needs to escape. Then in the story the women states how the women is trapped behind bars in wallpaper, which symbolized how the women

“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 period where women were oppressed. Women were treated as second rate people in society during this time period. Charlotte Perkins Gilman very accurately portrays the thought process of the society during the time period in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written. Using the aspects of Feminist criticism, one can analyze “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman through the dialogue through both the male and female perspective, and through the symbol found in the story.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provides an insight into the life of the narrator- a woman suppressed and unable to express herself because of her controlling husband- leading the reader down her fall to insanity, allowing for her inner conflict to be clearly expressed. The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story develops.