The Symbolism Of 'The Household In The Yellow Wallpaper'

The story "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about control. In the late 1800's, women were looked upon as having no effect on society other than bearing children and keeping house. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world dominated by males. The men held the jobs, the men held the knowledge, the men held the key to the lock known as society . . . or so they thought. The narrator in "The Wallpaper" is under this kind of control from her husband, John. Although most readers believe this story is about a woman who goes insane, it is actually about a woman’s quest for control of her life.

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the

  “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 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 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.

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

Gender roles seem to be as old as time and have undergone constant, but sometime subtle, revisions throughout generations. Gender roles can be defined as the expectations for the behaviors, duties and attitudes of male and female members of a society, by that society. The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is a great example of this. There are clear divisions between genders. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century where a rigid distinction between the domestic role of women and the active working role of men exists (“Sparknotes”). The protagonist and female antagonists of the story exemplify the women of their time; trapped in a submissive, controlled, and isolated domestic sphere, where they are treated

In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator, a woman who is going crazy from spending all her time indoors staring at a yellow wallpaper, that actually resembles her own state of mind, is subdued by her overpowering husband. The story takes on a somewhat feminist tone, and an important central idea that can be seen in this short story is the inferior status of women, and how they were confined in society by men. In “ The Yellow Wallpaper”, a key central idea is the inferior, and confined status of women, and the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the literary element of imagery to illustrate this central idea.     One instance where the narrator is clearly feeling trapped is when she says,” On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. /

Not only does the yellow wallpaper represent how the narrator feels physically trapped by the room but also how she feels oppressed by society. Through out her

I. In the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is shown to be inferior to her husband, as shown by all the restrictions he placed upon her, which demonstrates the power and control men have over women in the 19th century.

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’.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story telling about a young woman who is eventually driven mad by the society. The narrator is apparently confused with the norm defining “true” and “good” woman constructed by society dominated by man. “The Awakening” addressed the social, scientific, and cultural landscape of the country and the undergoing of radical changes. Each of these stories addresses the issue of women’s rights and how they were treated in the late 19th century. “The Awakening” explores one woman's desire to find and live fully within her true self. Her devotion to that purpose caused friction between her friends and family, and also conflicts with the dominant values of her time.

even in her writing. Although her husband seems to love her, he doesn’t understand what

The story begins with the female protagonist writing in a journal about the house her husband John has rented for the summer. John, a physician, has diagnosed his wife with a nervous disorder and prescribes rest and relaxation in solace to cure her. She comments on the style of the old house, saying that it is ―a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate‖ and would even venture to call it ―a haunted house,‖ which foreshadows unusual occurrences that happen later on in the story (372). The house and bedroom where the protagonist stays is an example of spatial enclosure as it is isolated from other people and she is literally enclosed within both. The image of the house is an important element for it symbolizes the ownership males had over females. ―For not only did a nineteenth-century woman writer have to inhabit ancestral mansions (or cottages) owned and built by men, she was also constricted and restricted by the Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction male writers authored‖ (Gilbert and Gubar xi). The narrator of ―The Yellow Wallpaper‖ moved in consequence to her husband‘s orders to a home that was built by men and which had been owned, and was now rented, by a man. A second layer of male ownership of females is exemplified in this story when John tries to restrict his wife from writing. The literary

Metaphorically, the room in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a prison. The patterns of the paper appear as bars to Jane, mirroring the actual bars on the windows, and eventually reveal a woman trapped behind them.  Consciously, or perhaps subconsciously, Jane identifies herself as one of the imaginary women, realizing that she is a fellow prisoner.  John, acting as a parent, placing Jane in a room that was formerly a nursery, symbolizes her childlike place in her marriage, and society at large.