The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

She can identify the shape of a woman. In her real life she is less and less the woman John used to know and is becoming more of her own person, but her ability to identify with the woman in the paper frightens her. "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman, stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here!"

With the ending near, the narrator gradually descends into madness. While examining the wallpaper closely at night she narrates, “The woman behind it shakes it!” she writes, “and she crawls around fast and her crawling shakes it all over.” “And in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (Gilman 516). The woman that the narrator sees is actually herself. It is a projection of her because she cannot escape John’s control just how the woman cannot escape the wallpaper. Her illness has become so great she thinks a woman is shaking the wallpaper around the entire room. The problem here is John’s treatment. It has caused her to believe in ghostly objects that do not exist. The phrase, “her crawling shakes it all over” shows how John’s treatment has affected her. The narrator crawls and creeps around the room. She goes

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

The geographical, physical, and historical settings in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" were more than the primary character could handle. The geography would lead to think she could enjoy the environment, but she chose not to. The physical setting showed us the reader just how grotesque and unbearable it would be to live a room in which the wallpaper to over the narrators mind. Lastly, we looked at how historically women were not allowed to speak their minds about how they felt. Maybe now that John has seen his wife go completely insane for himself he will finally seek extra attention for

“The Yellow Wallpaper” a short story about a mentally ill women,written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at age 32, in 1892 is a story with a hidden meaning and many truths. Charlotte Perkins Gilman coincidentally also had a mental illness and developed cancer leading her to kill herself in the sixties. The story begins with Jane, the mentally ill woman who feels a bit distressed, and although both of the well respected men in her life are physicians she is put simply on a “rest cure”. This rest cure as well as many symbols such as the Yellow Wallpaper, her journal, and her inevitable breakdown are prime examples of the typical life of a woman in this time period and their suppressed lives that they lived even with something as serious as a

In The Yellow Wallpaper, a young woman and her husband rent out a country house so the woman can get over her “temporary nervous depression.” She ends up staying in a large upstairs room, once used as a “playroom and gymnasium, […] for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” A “smoldering unclean yellow” wallpaper, “strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” lines the walls, and “the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes [that] stare at you upside down.” The husband, a doctor, uses S. Weir Michell's “rest cure” to treat her of her sickness, and he directs her to live isolated in this strange room. The

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

As she stares at this wallpaper for hours, she thinks she sees a woman in the pattern of the paper. Jane states "I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was [...] behind [the] dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman." When she decides that there is a women trapped in the wallpaper she becomes obsessed with what the women is doing. She says "I don't want to leave now until I have found it out." Perhaps in an attempt to save her own sanity, Jane stares endlessly at this pattern and creates what she perceives to be a woman because she has nothing else to fill her time. Jane determines that the image is a woman struggling to become free and she aligns herself with the woman. Jane mentions "I see her [...] creeping all around the garden [and] I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping [...] I always lock the door when I creep[...]. I can't do it [...], for I know [my husband] would suspect something at once." Jane sees her own self in the woman she created in the wallpaper. The fact that she says she must lock her door shows that she is afraid of her husband finding her out and putting a stop to what she feels is her only comfort. We also see in her visions of the woman in the wallpaper, the beginning of her slow decent into her own madness.

Making the room seem more prisonlike then homely. It is within that room that the reader is first introduced to the “ghost”. As time goes on the narrator begins to see a woman behind this ghastly yellow wallpaper that she is forced to look at every day. We are introduced to this wallpaper as “a woman that is stooping down and creeping behind that pattern” (Gilman 72). As the story progresses the narrator begins to see the woman more and more clearly behind this yellow wallpaper. “The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (73). The longer the story goes the more the reader begins to understand who the woman is. Behind the Yellow Wallpaper lie our narrator and her thoughts and emotions. Like the “woman” she sees behind the yellow wallpaper she feels trapped without a way out. And the ghost is what she sees within herself. Both are being kept inside during the daytime while they want to be outside being active. As we progress the woman behind the wallpaper shakes and moves more agitated, as the narrator herself becomes more agitated and trying to break free in a sense. What the reader comes to understand within the story is that the narrator isn’t trying to break out of the room, but rather break out of the submissive relationship she has with her husband. And the ghost behind the wallpaper represents

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

She devises a plan to rip down the wallpaper and free the trapped woman the last night her and her husband stay in the house. At last, it is time for the woman to save the girl in the wallpaper. When her husband leaves for work, and the night begins to fall, the woman locks herself in her bedroom and begins to pull the paperback. She writes that by morning she and the woman have pulled off yards of the wallpaper and that she will remove more as the day continues. The woman continues to rip at the paper, anticipating her husband’s reaction to what she has done.

Also, the last scene where the narrator is trying to escape her room, her husband symbolically obstructs the way for his wife. The symbolism being once again the husband acting like the male society at the time. Critics tend to argue over the actual meaning of the story. Writers have criticized that the narrator is a “feminist heroine” or that they have seen her as “a maternal failure coupled with a fear of female sexuality,” (Werlock). The yellow wallpaper is also interpreted as the “exemplar of the silencing of woman writers in the 19th century America.”

She is particularly disturbed by the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom, with its strange, formless pattern. However, with John's presence, her writing stops due to the “rest cure”. Soon the wallpaper dominates the narrator’s imagination. She becomes possessive and secretive, hiding her interest in the paper and making sure no one else examines it so that she can “find it out” on her own. She loses touch with the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner reality of her life.

First published in 1982, The yellow wallpaper is an engaging narrative , written in first person in which the narrator suffers from some type of nervous disorder . Her husband who prefers to refer to her condition as a temporary nervous depression or a slight hysterical tendency recommends that the narrator seeks solitude so as to recuperate . The short story mimics the form of secret and private entries on journals by the author. The haunting short story chronicles that descent of the narrator and protagonist into maddened and paranormal activities. Some people however interpret it as her chronicles to freedom .The author effectively employs the use of literary

Eventually, the moonlight reveals bars behind the wallpaper as well as a clear contour of a woman. This may be interpreted as the intense struggle enhanced at night time, the time when the narrator has to spend with her husband. Night time may also serve to symbolize a forceful necessity to perform sexual relations with her husband. Ultimately I think the narrator starts recognizing herself behind that pattern. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the literary woman frequently finds herself starring with horror at a fearful image of herself that has been mysteriously inscribed on the surface of the glass, and she tries to guess the truth that cannot be uttered by the wounded or bleeding mouth […], and secretly seeks to unify herself by coming to terms with her fragmentation (1365). I interpret this passage to mean that the narrator recognizes her own reflection