The Yellow Wallpaper Setting Analysis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the life and mind of a woman suffering from post-partum depression in the late eighteenth century. Gilman uses setting to strengthen the impact of her story by allowing the distant country mansion symbolize the loneliness of her narrator, Jane. Gilman also uses flat characters to enhance the depth of Jane’s thoughts; however, Gilman’s use of narrative technique impacts her story the most. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses interior monologue to add impact to Jane’s progression into insanity, to add insight into the relationships in the story, and to increase the depth of Jane’s connection with the yellow wallpaper it self.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator uses the psychological gothic genre to present the portrayal of women, women faced in a marriage, within the time frame of the 1890s. Women were seen as the “shadow” as men dominated society. This is presented throughout the book as many readers first interpitation

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and shows how it changes one’s life forever.

“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.

The windows show the outside world, showing you what lies beyond the four walls which you are stuck between. Many cases throughout the book result in a woman’s character being trapped and not being able to leave the house they are in. The women then result in looking out the windows only to dream about leaving. “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (11). The main character’s grandmother was trapped in her own house, her husband had stripped her of her freedom and was enable to leave. Windows are tricky, they are sweet like honey showing you the outside world, but in the book the character, then realizes they cannot venture past them so they

   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 story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the setting is very symbolic when analyzing the different the meanings of this book. The main character in the story is sick with nervous depression. In the story, John, her husband, and also a physician, takes his wife to a house in the middle of the summer and confines her to one room in hopes of perfect rest for her. As the story progresses, it is made clear that confinement, sanity, insanity, and freedom are all tied together and used to make the setting of the story symbolic.

As I started reading this short story, it clearly introduced who the characters are and where it took place. The narrator is a woman; she has no name, remains anonymous throughout the story. She lives with her husband John in a house. This house is isolated from society, since the short story indicates that it is far from village, roads or any means of communication. It also contains locks and gates throughout. The woman is ill and this illness has placed her in a weak position with her husband and everything around her. We know that she likes to write, but her husband doesn’t let her, so she does it in secret. Although this type of writing is mainly to show mild personality disorder in dealing with life,

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 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’.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman uses the wallpaper in the bedroom as a symbol to represent the oppression of sexism and the dialogue within the diary resembles the social hierarchy men had in a marriage. Gilman wrote this piece in the progressive era when gothic literature was popular and woman’s rights were debatable. Gilman was a young adult that experienced post-partum depression after her first born and, like the girl in the story, she was told by a man that she no longer needed to write nor work to heal. In the progressive era they believed in the “rest cure” which women were treated delicate and were to stay in fine confinement. The woman in the story believed that it was worse for her to stay in bed but never wanted to undermine her husband.

Normally this image speaks to a sea of possibilities, although she doesn't to perceive the possibilities of being without her husband although she was scared and loved him as well. Towards the end she stays close to the window and says, "I don't like to look out of the windows even - there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. " She knows that she needs to be hidden and sleeping and lie low; Furthermore she doesn't need to perceive every last one of other ladies because she knows they need aid because they are reflections for herself. The window symbolizes the path of hope and

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” serves as a perfect example of how women are treated in the 19th century. The distracting details both surrounding and filling the new house that the main character and her husband move into haunt her. Throughout the story, the main character, as she observes the house while in isolation, notices the true meaning in life, specifically for women. Gilman’s piece unveils the unfortunate requirements that women must meet in order to become accepted into society. The imagery and description of the house mentioned in “The Yellow Wall-paper” holds a much more symbolized sense reassuring the main character about women’s roles in life, according to humanity.

Gilman, Frost, and Edson use setting to demonstrate the strain that can exist between people in times of conflict. In Gilman 's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" the relationship between a man and a women displayed distressed. Gilman 's use of setting allows the reader to demonstrate how women were meant to be seen, not