The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” John acts as the mirror through which women are viewed negatively in the society, a society in which women are not considered citizens. They are not supposed to be anywhere near the political or public environment. Instead, they should remain in their homes. This view has led to women creating women movements to fight for their place in the society.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short-story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was first published in 1892. This short-story is written in the first-person point of view. This helps show a collection of journal entries by a woman who is oppressed, suffering from what we now know as post-partum depression and denied a chance to express herself by her physician husband. This condition frustrates her health in the end, becoming psychotic and paranoid about any human contact, even delusional. She is locked in a solitary room for most of the story. She is only accompanied by old, peeling, yellow wallpaper. At the end of the story, the narrator talks about her freedom, further indicating the position of women at that time. This analysis of the short story focuses on the theme of gender brought forth in the story as well as the position Jane takes in furthering this theme.

The narrator is diagnosed with a “nervous disorder” and is ordered by her physician, who also happens to be her husband, to abstain from most activity and all intellectual work. The same treatment Gilman was forced to take part in. The narrator is deprived of any stimulus or outlet for thought or action, and she begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper. Her discovery of the women trapped in the pattern in the wallpaper symbolizes the pattern of behaviors and practices that trap the female sex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens.

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.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” suggests that the woman behind the wallpaper parallels the narrator’s struggle

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a great example of early works pertaining to feminism and the disease of insanity. Charlotte Gilman’s own struggles as a woman, mother, and wife shine through in this short story capturing the haunting realism of a mental breakdown.The main character, much like Gilman herself, slips into bouts of depression after the birth of her child and is prescribed a ‘rest cure’ to relieve the young woman of her suffering. Any use of the mind or source of stimulus is strictly prohibited, including the narrator’s favorite hobby of writing. The woman’s husband, a physician, installs into his wife that the rest treatment is correct and will only due harm if not followed through. This type of treatment ultimately drives the woman insane, causing her to envision a woman crawling behind the yellow wallpaper of her room. Powerlessness and repression the main character is subject to creates an even more poignant message through the narrator’s mental breakdown. The ever present theme of subordination of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is advanced throughout the story by the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

   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.

Kessler emphasizes the point that this one short story seemed parallel and mirror the views of Gilman in regards to the oppression of women in her society. Comparing the two, Kessler writes, “This once she was able to join her public and private expressions in a work of devastating impact” (Kessler 1991 p.159). Gilman, who was a leader and crusader in the women’s rights movement, tried to expel away the gender bias that plague women, just as the narrator in her story tries to pull off the wallpaper in her room to free the trapped women behind it. The patriarchal society at that time period was Gilman’s wallpaper. She had to work hard at trying to force through societal changes. Just like the resistant old wallpaper in her story, ridged and yellow with age, Gilman and her counterparts had much difficulty in pushing through the wallpaper of tradition.

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.

In the story”The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman reveals changes in the narrator that expresses the yellow wallpaper which she has to write down in her journal because the 1900’s women didn't get the respect that men all got. At first the wallpaper was nothing to her but now it has her and now she is found of the room. The different symbols used in the,” The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman reveal changes the narrator to a feminist story which shows her frustration by being trapped and not being herself. First symbol that Gilman stated in this reading was the yellow wallpaper. In this symbol the narrator has thoughts of hating the room with this wallpaper but throughout the story the wallpaper dwells in her.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman uses the wallpaper as the image to represent the struggle of the Protagonist, Jane. Her struggle involves how she should behave as a mother and as a woman. She does not understand her roles in the society. The wallpaper, which shows a woman, represents her struggle. For example, in Gilman (83), she says, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!”

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman focuses on the oppression of women in the 19th century. The story introduces us into the awareness of a woman who is slowly going insane over the course of the summer. She recently just gave birth to a baby and is most likely suffering from some type of depression. Analyzing this story, we see the frustrations of women during The Victorian era. Women were manipulated into certain stereotypes as a wife and mother. Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper” analyses the question is “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s real life experiences are reflected in her short story”? “The Yellow Wallpaper” examines the theme of

“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 belief. The story appears to take place during a time period where women were oppressed. Women were treated as second rate people in society during this time period. Charlotte Perkins Gilman very accurately portrays the thought process of the society during the time period in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written. Using the aspects of Feminist criticism, one can analyze “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman through the dialogue through both the male and female perspective, and through the symbol found in the story.

Gilman recognizes not only is the wallpaper a figure of societies holds, but that inequality is impossible to escape from. Gilman uses the wallpaper as symbolic to prove the truth about

The narrator, who is never named, is depicted as a woman who is confined and repressed based on her gender. During the time Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the feminist movement was going through its second surge and was continuously expanding. Gilman was considered “the idol of radical feminists” (Degler 21) and the “most original and challenging mind, which the women movement produced” (Degler 21). One of the major themes found throughout Gilman’s writings is “to show the disastrous and all-pervasive effects upon women and upon society of the continued suppression of her sex” ( Degler 22). This is seen in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, when the narrator