The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a 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 12). The narrator strongly resists the wallpaper because it constantly forces its ugliness upon her mind. The paper serves as an unattractive, unresolved and complex symbol throughout the story. “The female lineage that the wallpaper represents is thick, with life, expression, and suffering (Treichler 193).

The Yellow Wallpaper is a type of story where the narrator writes to herself. Her descent into madness is both seen subjectively and objectively as the narrator portrays. If Gilman had told her story in a traditions first-person narration the events that are from inside the narrators head would not be able to be told and the reader would not know what she is thinking, and the women inside the wallpaper might seem to actually exist. If told in third-person narrative then the political symbolism would not be seen. Gilman also uses a journal to give the story intimacy and allow the narrator to put down thoughts and feelings. Whereas in A Room of One’s Own, the author gives the narrator a place where she can write what she thinks without any input or bother from society. A place for women to put down their thoughts and express themselves.

Gilman's use of narrative structure is important in depicting the fragmentation of the woman's mind. Through the course of the story sentences become increasingly choppy and paragraphs decrease in length. This concrete element of fiction illustrates the deterioration of that narrator's psychological well-being and mental surmise to the yellow wallpaper.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman discusses the oppression men have towards women through the story of a nameless narrator during the 19th century. In the story, the unknown narrator, a woman, is telling her struggle for freedom and her fight to escape from the subordination in her marriage with a physician. In the story, the narrator suffers an illness that prevents her from doing things she likes such as writing. Throughout her illness, the narrator slowly becomes aware of her situation and then starts to fight to change her living condition with her husband. Through the use of two major symbols established throughout the text, Gilman brings awareness of women’s struggle to end their oppression by men and their fight to change the way society is dominated by men. In addition, the symbols used by Gilman underline the way women suffrage awareness slowly began to spread during the 19th century.

“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.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brilliant work, The Yellow Wallpaper, readers explore the consequences of the ignorance of mental health, as well Gilman’s underlying message of the restriction of women, in nineteenth century America. The author of this story doesn’t want readers to focus on the progression of the woman when realizing her real situation, but in my opinion, how Gilman comments with this piece of fiction to the real oppression of women, and lack of weight Medicine held on the patient 's opinions in Charlotte’s society.

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 paper Gilman used symbolisms to illustrate the struggles and oppression of women as well as seeking freedom. The main symbol of course is the title "The Yellow Paper." The yellow paper is the wallpaper in which she attempts to figure out the throughout the story. As Gilman begins to analyze this wallpaper she comes to a conclusion that there are "many women behind, and sometimes only one", and as further analyzation she adds "They get through, and then the pattern strangles them ..." (Gilman). She reflects on all women in her society being trapped and wanting to escape from the roles and the lifestyle they're being put in, but every time it results in failure. Furthermore, she used the colour yellow to enhance the wall paper and depict on how women are being viewed. In literature the colour yellow is an unstable colour, stimulates mental activity, sickness and a disturbing influence (Parker). Gilman achieves one of her main points of women being viewed as "sick" and "unstable" during that time era, and that's how men viewed them as. Lastly she uses the term "nursery" to describe the room she is being put in. In the beginning of the story as she describes the room she points out that she is "up in this atrocious nursery"(Gilman). The terminology she chose to use in this sentence reflects on how women are viewed and treated as "children."

Perkins Gilman aptly used narrative voice to shape the meaning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by writing a first-person narrative about a woman who slowly loses herself to madness. This voice is one of a woman who may possibly have post-partum depression or some other form of manic depression, and her unheard cries for help. She slowly draws within herself, and allows the insanity to take over. Within the first few paragraphs we learn general characteristics about the narrator: she is middle class, as indicated by the phrase “mere ordinary people” (354); we also learn that she is married, suggested a statement about John laughing at her, something she says is only expected in marriage. Though we are never given her name, these generic aspects

Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” centers around a woman who is dealing with a serious mental condition. In the story readers see different themes, symbols, and metaphors that are portrayed throughout the book. The madness aspect, society and class, freedom, and treatments all are different themes and symbols that the author uses throughout the story. Society and class play a big role in the story. Society is much different in the 1950s apart from how it is today.

treats her like a child and just like a child she is kept in this

The story The Yellow Wallpaper includes a deeper meaning of the dreadful wallpaper that the narrator comes to hate so much as a significant symbol in the story. The yellow wallpaper can represent many ideas and conditions, among them, the sense of entrapment and a distraction that becomes an obsession. Examine the references to the yellow wallpaper and notice how they become more frequent and how they develop over the course of the story. Why is the wallpaper an adequate symbol to represent the woman’s confinement and her emotional condition? Gilman uses first person point of view narration in this story to make the description of the color more impactful through her direct association of the color and Jane’s emotional reactions to it.

Gilman writes “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a description of the flaws in marriage and in society. Though at its core the story is about a woman’s descent into madness, Gilman’s purpose through the representation of the wallpaper itself is to point out the oppression of a woman’s freedom and creativity; to tell a dramatized story of how one frees themselves. The wallpaper is an object of obsession for the narrator; it is a thing which confuses, disgusts, and captivates her. The colour yellow is never used to represent something that is happy— its use as a symbol represents that of a sickness, something that is “repellant, almost revolting”, with a “sickly sulphur tint” (Gilman, 649).

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman creates a character of a young depressed woman, on the road to a rural area with her husband, so that she can be away from writing, which appears to have a negative effect on her psychological state. Lanser says her husband “heads a litany of benevolent prescriptions that keep the narrator infantilized, immobilized, and bored literally out of her mind. Reading or writing herself upon the wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance” (432). In the story both theme and point of view connect and combine to establish a powerful picture of an almost prison-type of treatment for conquering depression. In the story, Jane battles with male domination, because she is informed by both her husband and brother countless brain shattering things about her own condition that she does not agree with. She makes every effort to become independent, and she desires to escape from the burdens of that domination. The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the character’s point of view in a structure similar to a diary, which explains her time spent in her home. The house is huge and old with annoying yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. The character thinks that there is a woman behind bars in the design of the wallpaper. She devotes a great deal of her