The Yellow Wallpaper Definition

"The story was wrenched out of Gilman 's own life, and is unique in the

A Critical Analysis of Formal Elements in the Short Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes the form of journal entries of a woman undergoing treatment for postpartum depression. Her form of treatment is the “resting cure,” in which a person is isolated and put on bed rest. Her only social interaction is with her sister-in-law Jennie and her husband, John, who is also her doctor. Besides small interactions with them, most of the time she is left alone. Society believes all she needs is a break from the stresses of everyday life, while she believes that “society and stimulus” (pg 347, paragraph 16) will make

One similarity between the two works is the that we are limited on where we get our information. Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we see everything through the eyes of the narrator. The entire story is told from her secret diary when she has the time to write as shown in the line, “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal-having to be so sly about it” (Gilman 527). Due to this, we can only make assumptions based on the information we get from her. She tells us she is in “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate” (Gilman 526) and that she stays in “a big, airy room…It was a nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium” (Gilman 527). However, once we reach the end of the story, with the

The yellow wallpaper in the room shows, symbolically, the narrator was being oppressed. The narrator hated the wallpaper because she saw herself as a prisoner of her own husband. Spending so much time in the room, the narrator studied the wallpaper in details and found the wallpaper somewhat represents her. "There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other" (pg280), "Such a peculiar odor, too" (pg 285) etc. The confusing pattern, the bar, the woman behind the bar, and the yellow color of the wallpaper allowed her to feel so helpless, as if she was a bird

The Yellow Paper is a symbolic story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is a disheartening tale of a woman struggling to free herself from postpartum depression. This story gives an account of an emotionally and intellectual deteriorated woman who is a wife and a mother who is struggling to break free from her metal prison and find peace. The post-partum depression forced her to look for a neurologist doctor who gives a rest cure. She was supposed to have a strict bed rest. The woman lived in a male dominated society and wanted indictment from it as she had been driven crazy by as a result of the Victorian “rest-cure.” Her husband made sure that she had a strict bed rest by separating her from her child by taking her to recuperate in

Feminist studies generally focus on the role that hysterical diagnoses and treatments played in reinforcing the prevailing, male-dominant gender roles through the subversion, manipulation and degrading of female experience through the use of medical treatments and power structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper” is a perfect example of these themes. In writing this story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew upon her own personal experiences with hysteria. The adoption of the sick-role was a product of-and a reaction against gender norms and all of the pressures and tensions that their satisfaction demanded. Gilman’s essay uses autobiographical experiences displayed as doppelganger quality the in the main narrator of the

These "things" are sinister vestiges of ancestry in the natural history of this supposed nursery: barred windows and rings mounted on the wall are more evocative of imprisonment and even torture than they are of children's recreation. Other signs of duress that emerge-the gnawed bedstead, the wallpaper that is stripped at arm's length around the bed, the "smooch" of a shoulder rubbed "round and round and round" at the base of the wall-are all evidence of the behavior of the room's earlier inhabitants and provide evidence of previous habitat adaption for the narrator to study. The feature that is most immediately provocative, and initially aversive, is the room's wallpaper, which appears to grow in fetid ribbons. First the narrator sees only curves in the pattern, but then she finds they "commit suicide" by their motion, and soon she fills the curves with human features-"two bulbous eyes" (6) that have a "vicious influence" (7). Thus far she is resisting her surroundings, pitting herself against its energies and apart from the system of the room.

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

"There comes John, and I must put this away -- he hates to have me write a

Without question the short story Yellow Wallpaper would definitely be categorized into a male dominant/feminist interpretation. The story is a perfect example of the stereotype, "that a male knows best". Throughout the story the author does a good job of placing you in the women's shoes. He makes you feel the control he has over her, mentally as well as physically.

My perspective of Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is influenced by a great number of different and diverse methods of reading. However, one cannot overlook the feminist theorists’ on this story, for the story is often proclaimed to be a founding work of feminism. Further, the historical and biographical contexts the story was written in can be enlightened by mentioning Gilman’s relationship with S. Weir Mitchell. And I can’t help but read the story and think of Foucault’s concept of Panopticism as a method of social control. Lastly, of course, there’s the psychological perspective on the story, although in my readings of psychology, particularly the psychological knowledge surrounding both women and queers, I find the

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman's point of view is expressed through first person narration, which provides her