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.

     Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is as a wonderful example of the gothic horror genre. It was not until the rediscovery of the story in the early 1970’s that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was recognized as a feminist indictment of a male dominated society. The story contains many typical gothic trappings, but beneath the conventional façade hides a tale of repression and freedom told in intricate symbolism as seen through the eyes of a mad narrator.

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.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins describes the story of a woman suffering from a mental illness during the 19th century. The protagonist (an unknown narrator) is a wife and mother suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, diagnosed her with hysteria and he decided to move away with her to start a “rest cure,” at a mansion, isolated from the village. The narrator was powerless against her husband, and he had the authority of determining what she does, who she sees, and where she goes while she recovers from her illness. Throughout the story, the author used stylistic elements, such as strong symbolism, to show how the mental state of the narrator slowly deteriorates and ends

It is also notable that the protagonist’s room is located at the top of the mansion and was formerly a nursery. At the top of the mansion, she is far away from everyone and everything and can only look out from her barred window. This is similar to the tale of Rapunzel, a girl trapped in a tower with no one to communicate with. The narrator’s room being a former nursery and playroom may also give insight to John’s attitude towards her, in that he sees her as a child that needs to be pacified and doted on rather than a grown woman that can make her own choices about her illness and its treatment. The yellow wallpaper that decorates the room is what catches the narrator’s eye, as she finds it unbearably

   In the disturbing novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, the setting in which the action takes place is extremely important. The author uses setting to focus the reader’s attention into the story in a gradual manner. Also, the manipulation of setting allows the author to subtly introduce symbols in the text. These symbols represent Gilman’s view on the status of women in the patriarchal society of the nineteenth century.

John’s seemingly overwhelming need to ensure she is healthy mentally and physically, drives him to control all aspects of her life. He has his sister come to the mansion to keep an eye on his wife while he’s away in town with his patients. John chose the mansion for its isolation and privacy as he needs to have his wife healthy or it could affect his reputation,. He also picked the nursery as their bedroom as another way to have his wife secluded. The location of the room is on the uppermost level of the house with stairs are gated at the top. There are also bars on the windows as if it is a jail. There is busy ugly peeling yellow wallpaper around the room and they’ve moved in furniture from downstairs. She pleads with John to allow her to stay in the lovely room with veranda on the lower floor. He argues that the nursery with the windows, air and sunlight will be much better for her and he may need a second bed or room for himself. As a compromise, he tells her she could have the cellar whitewashed (239). Either place, the nursery or the cellar, is a prison, which the asylums of the time resembled. John is just containing his wife the only way he knows given his status as a physician. He loves and cares for her and needs her to recover and take care of the family. John is exerting himself by pushing her back into the role she has agreed to by being his

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through

The setting is necessary to the story because in this time period, men had all the control. Women were seen as nothing more than nurses, housewives, and factories for the future men. Charlotte was surrounded by doctors, but because of the early time, the rest cure was suitable for everything. Since men believed women had no real logistical power, they never took anything the women had to say seriously.

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

What if we were all one upset away from insanity? One minute we were battling a mild bout of depression, the next we were battling to keep our sanity. The fictional short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, tells a similar tale. Only it doesn’t seem to be a complete work of fiction, rather loosely inspired by true events from the author, Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s own life. It’s a story about isolation and oppression.

The fact that she is in the nursery of that house is because John wanted her to be there. And he ignores what she says “there is something strange about the house--I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight

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.

The passage of time was incredibly important in this situation. In order to understand how the next situation would unfold, and why it would unfold that way, the viewer needed to have a full understanding of why the apartment was so important, and why Lil Zé would want

Another detail that seems irrelevant when reading the story is when the narrator talks about the woman that she sees in the wallpaper. She says this on page 8.