The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and shows how it changes one’s life forever.

“The Cult of Domesticity” was alive and well in the United States during the nineteenth century. Men were the leaders and breadwinners, while women were the homemakers and domesticates. Since women were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, they were best suited to the domestic sphere (Hughes). It is against this backdrop that Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin write “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and “The Story of an Hour” (1894), respectively. Each story is an allegory that spotlights female oppression by patriarchal authority and the struggles of women to attain liberty from this oppression. Although these short stories share the same themes, they are told from different points of view. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a narrative told from the first person point of view. “The Story of an Hour” is a short story told from a third person point of view. Both authors use space to depict the plight of a repressed wife’s conflict between self desires for freedom and society’s matronly expectations. Gilman and Chopin also use strong symbolism and irony to emphasize the social factors of the period that prevent the satisfaction of such desires for liberty by women.

How does the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Gilman utilize symbolism in order to strongly develop a central theme? Every aspect of writing assists us as readers to further grasp the understand of a central theme as the writing comes together as one. Without the assistance of symbolism, it would have been strenuous to uncover the true meaning behind the short story, considering we would have no true appreciation for what certain aspects within the story signify. As readers, we could have easily viewed the yellow wallpaper for what it is; a simple decorative aspect within the room. Since we were able to get into the woman’s mind and we know how she viewed it, we know this isn’t true. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, symbolism can be seen within the woman’s husband, and within the yellow wallpaper since it symbolizes many aspects, such as the woman’s hysteria heightening into a toxic take-over of her mind, it represents how she’s trapped within her own life, and the violent imagery shows how the woman has become suicidal; allowing us to comprehend how women were stripped of expressing their feelings during the nineteenth century.

As I started reading this short story, it clearly introduced who the characters are and where it took place. The narrator is a woman; she has no name, remains anonymous throughout the story. She lives with her husband John in a house. This house is isolated from society, since the short story indicates that it is far from village, roads or any means of communication. It also contains locks and gates throughout. The woman is ill and this illness has placed her in a weak position with her husband and everything around her. We know that she likes to write, but her husband doesn’t let her, so she does it in secret. Although this type of writing is mainly to show mild personality disorder in dealing with life,

Like Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a backbone of the feminism study. The story was first published in 1892 and it is in the form of a secret journal entries recorded by a woman who is supposed to be recovering from what her husband, a physician refers to as a ‘nervous condition’. This persistent psychological horror of the woman in the story chronicles the narrator’s descent into madness or paranormal but an analysis of the story reveals the plight of women during the late eighteenth century through dialogue and symbolism.

Underneath The Wallpaper Written in journal form, the author uses symbolism to paint a vivid picture of the character’s marriage, the social perception of women, and an inadequacy of understanding within field of psychology. The dialogue of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is taken from the context of the main characters journal. The main character shares her inner thoughts and perceptions to give the reader insight to her reality and deterioration of her mental condition. The yellow wall- paper encountered by the main character serves many symbolism functions to the author and is subject to interpretation by the reader. The main character perceives her husband John and herself as ordinary.

Throughout history, women have struggled to be seen as equals and have had to fight for their freedom from the roles society placed upon them. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman both use their literary works to show the challenges women went through, and how they battled for the freedoms they desperately wanted. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a woman that goes to a summer home to rest and get well under the supervision of her husband who is also a physician. Her husband decided it would be best if she sat in a room alone and did nothing. In the end, she becomes insane and finally finds her freedom. “The Story of An Hour” is about, Mrs. Mallard, a woman who has just found out her husband has died. Mrs. Mallard

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” both tell us that some women have a lack of independence because of being told what to do, having limitations put on their abilities, and having a family member being an authoritarian figure in their life. Both stories are very similar when discussing the lack of independence that women may have. Women are always being belittled or controlled somewhere.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in 1890 around the beginning of the feminist movement. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uses her short story to illustrate the negative effects of unequal treatment against women. She uses the narrator's husband, John, as an example of the male superiority thriving in her time. As the narrator's illness worsens, the style of the narrative develops to accompany her mental state. Throughout the narrative, Gilman uses symbolism and style to illustrate the severity of unequal treatment towards women.

The word mental illness implies different things to various individuals, yet collectively, our society’s thoughts come down to what can be bluntly put as "shun it". Charlotte Perkins Gilman, however, addresses this perception with a different approach through her short story. It revolves around the narrator, who is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression and is consequently prescribed a treatment that forbids her from doing the one thing she could do all day – write, but instead spend all her time imprisoned in a room with a disturbing wallpaper. Gilman gathered inspiration from a personal encounter with a similar mental illness due to which he was prescribed rest cure, which she found very ineffective (Gilman 669). Similar to some of today’s psychiatric hospitals’ treatment methods, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” depicts the society’s undeveloped negative approach towards psychological sickness.

Lots of people know what it feels like being trapped, but how many people can actually say they've been trapped both physically and emotionally? Charlotte Gilman depicts a womans uneasy mentality in the short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper. " Gilman takes readers inside the mind and emotions of a woman suffering from a slow mental breakdown that progresses over the plot of the story. The story suggests that all women are imprisoned by masculine authority, which imposes itself despite its detrimental effects. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes how women felt trapped to highlight the structure of the household, the domestic life in which women were oppressed, and womens lack of voice during the 19th century.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story of a young woman who suffers from a nervous and mental breakdown. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, is the most troubling aspect in her life; for he is in control of the narrator’s life and body. John belittles the narrator’s condition countless times and prohibits her from writing, working, and seeing her family members. She is kept imprisoned in every aspect of her life, but mostly in her marriage and in her house. The narrator is confined in a nursery with barred windows and yellow wallpaper in a mansion that she describes as a “haunted house” (Gilman 111). With little to do and no one to talk to, the narrator blankly stares at the yellow wallpaper day after day; She confides in no one but dead sheets of paper. Throughout the story, the narrator is unhappy and states over and over again how she wants to leave, so why doesn’t she? The frightening and obscure answer is that John is not really her husband. John is her abductor.

Throughout history and cultures today, women have been beaten, verbally abused, and taught to believe they have no purpose in life other than pleasing a man. Charlotte Perkins Gillam uses her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a weapon to help break down the walls surrounding women, society has put up. This story depicts the life of a young woman struggling with postpartum depression, whose serious illness is overlooked, by her physician husband, because of her gender. Gillman 's writing expresses the feelings of isolation, disregarded, and unworthiness the main character Jane feels regularly. This analysis will dive into the daily struggles women face through oppression, neglect, and physical distinction; by investigating each section

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

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.