The Struggle for Power in "The Yellow Wallpaper, " "Daddy, " and "Editha"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1899, is a semi-autobiographical short story depicting a young woman’s struggle with depression that is virtually untreated and her subsequent descent into madness. Although the story is centered on the protagonist’s obsessive description of the yellow wallpaper and her neurosis, the story serves a higher purpose as a testament to the feminist struggle and their efforts to break out of their domestic prison. With reference to the works of Janice Haney-Peritz’s, “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s

She has found purpose in this paper. Indeed she cannot be understood by anyone except the woman in the yellow wallpaper. Her creeping about is symbolic of her hiding, sometimes in broad daylight, from a world that looks at her as an outcast because she doesn’t want to be a typical domestic ornament. Perhaps the yellow wallpaper acted as a mirror for our narrator. As she peered into the wall’s secrets night after night her vanity gradually became insanity. She knew she could not free herself in the world she lived in.

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she

As the story progresses, the narrator thinks that maybe she could gain some control over things. She begins to gain mental strength from the wallpaper. Her mind begins to churn and she commits the ultimate crime in John’s eyes . . . she thinks. She thinks that maybe John is not entirely correct about everything. However, she knows that she cannot have John know about it. She has to do it in her mind for now. She begins by analyzing the wallpaper. John has told her that she should not let such things bother her. She focuses on it for that simple fact. She feels she knows something that John does not. This is clear when she says, "there are things in that paper that nobody knows but me" (488). The narrator is certain that she now has some knowledge that her "all-knowing" husband does not. Eugenia C. Delamotte says that the husband "uses his exclusively masculine knowledge as a source of power over his wife" (206). She is now beginning to realize that she has a mind of her own and is able to use it.

In the short story, the reader gets the sense that the narrator feels like the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Its symbolism progresses throughout the story. At first, it is just ugly and unappealing to look at because it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” It eventually captivates the narrator as she tries to figure out the seemingly formless pattern. The narrator eventually begins to hallucinate an eerie sub-pattern behind the main pattern. Ultimately, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a frantic woman, continually crawling and hunched,

As the reader is introduced to the main character in the story, she is heard talking about strange things happening around her. She secretly wrote her thought in a journal but her husband was against it and never wanted her to do anything. The nameless narrator in her madness sees a woman in the pattern of the wallpaper. In addition, she sees the woman struggling against the bars of the paper and this is a symbol for the struggle of women who attempt to break out from the infringing rules of the society. The woman the narrator sees caught in the wallpapers also parallels her virtual imprisonment in an isolated estate away from her child by her mean husband.

As the story progresses, the narrator thinks that maybe she could gain some control over things. She begins to gain mental strength from the wallpaper. Her mind begins to churn and she commits the ultimate crime in John’s eyes . . . she thinks. She thinks that maybe John is not entirely correct about everything. However, she knows that she cannot have John know about it. She has to do it in her mind for now. She begins by analyzing the wallpaper. John has told her that she should not let such things bother her. She focuses on it for that simple fact. She feels she knows something that John does not. This is clear when she says, "there are things in that paper that nobody knows but me" (488). The narrator is certain that she now has some knowledge that her "all-knowing" husband does not. Eugenia C. Delamotte says that the husband "uses his exclusively masculine knowledge as a source of power over his wife" (206). She is now beginning to realize

When her focus eventually settles on the wallpaper in the bedroom and she states, "I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (Gilman 260). As the narrator resigns herself to her intellectual confinement, she begins to see more details in the wallpaper pattern. This can be seen as the slow shift from the connection to her family, friends and colleagues to her focus inward as she sinks deeper into depression. She describes that "—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (Gilman 262). As she focuses inward, sinking deeper into her depression the figure in the wallpaper takes shape and she states that, "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will" (Gilman 264). And she begins to describe the form of a woman behind the wallpaper pattern, "Sometimes I think there are a

The yellow wallpaper is the most obvious symbol found in the story. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes how women were portrayed in the nineteenth century. In the story the narrator describes the wallpaper as "One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns, pronounced enough sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contraindications" (Gilman 545). The narrator basically feels that her life is dull and boring which can lead to her committing suicide. Later on in the story the wallpaper was described as “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream” (Gilman 548). The pattern in the wallpaper basically represents the narrator’s mindset. The narrator calls herself “hideous” and “unreliable.” Women during this time period were often view as “unreliable”

Women’s Rights has been a point of contention for a very long time. Especially during the late 19th and 20th century, it was a seemingly unorthodox idea in a patriarchal society. This is what makes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper a feminist piece still analyzed to this day. It was a story that was arguably ahead of its time, as was Gilman, with her utopian feminist ideals. She wrote the book with some introspection of her own postpartum depression. The Yellow Wallpaper has been deemed a classic feminist literature piece due to its layers of deeper meaning, achieved through Gilman’s use of symbolism, character, and setting, construed by many to represent the struggles faced by women in the late 19th century.

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.

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.

Reflecting upon their role in society, women in literature are often portrayed in a position

The reader gets a first glimpse at her insanity as she constantly jumps from one subject to another. Gilman’s thought process is much like that of an insane being as she begins to let her thoughts run together in a mass of confusion. For example, at the beginning, Gilman is writing about a discussion with her husband, John, when suddenly she skips to a description of the old house: “But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself-before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs…” (Gilman 470). This sense of confusion throughout the story relays to the reader that Gilman is indeed severely mentally confused and ill. According to several doctors in the medical journal Psychological Assessment, some of the characteristics of mentally ill patients during interpersonal and personal behavior include interruptions and ignoring personal boundaries (Kosson 91). These characteristics are seen in Gilman’s conversations with herself.