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The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Decent Essays

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story of a woman 's psychological breakdown, which is shown through an imaginative conversation with the wallpaper. The relationship between the female narrator and the wallpaper reveals the inner condition of the narrator and also symbolically shows how women are oppressed in society. The story, read through a feminist lens, reflects a woman 's struggle against the patriarchal power structure. In the “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the wallpaper as a symbol of the social and economic repression of the 19th century woman and her struggle to free herself. The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as an expression of the narrator’s deteriorating mental state, the “pattern” of social and economic dependence, which reduces women to domestic slavery and as a symbol of regression or restraints. The story is set in an estate, which is isolated from the town. The estate is surrounded with protective hedges and the main gate is always kept locked. The narrator, who is a woman, thinks that the protective hedges and the locked gate have isolated the mansion from the whole world. In fact, she is isolated from everything. She focuses on the yellow wallpaper in the room in which she is kept. Despite her protests, she is forced to conform to her husband’s wishes. She does not want to stay there and she feels imprisoned. “… the windows are barred for children, and there are rings and things in the walls”. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The

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