The Yellow Wallpaper The Nameless Woman

Being secluded from the outside world, and having nothing to do made the home feel like a prison. The similarities between the main character of, “The Yellow Wall-paper” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are uncanny. There is a lot of room for analysis within this story. Almost every line of this story can be picked apart to find hidden, yet important meanings.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's "The Yellow Wallpaper," relays to the reader something more than a simple story of a woman at the mercy of the limited medical knowledge in the late 1800 's. Gilman creates a character that expresses real emotions and a psyche that can be examined in the context of modern understanding. "The Yellow Wallpaper," written in first person and first published in 1892 in the January edition of the New England Magazine, depicts the downward spiral of depression, loss of control and competence, and feelings of worthlessness that lead to greater depression and the possibility of schizophrenia.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is centred in the writer’s narration, by setting the narrator to be not entirely reliable and an oppressed woman. The character are showed to be feeling trapped and unhappy with

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.

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she

As the reader is introduced to the main character in the story, she is heard talking about strange things happening around her. She secretly wrote her thought in a journal but her husband was against it and never wanted her to do anything. The nameless narrator in her madness sees a woman in the pattern of the wallpaper. In addition, she sees the woman struggling against the bars of the paper and this is a symbol for the struggle of women who attempt to break out from the infringing rules of the society. The woman the narrator sees caught in the wallpapers also parallels her virtual imprisonment in an isolated estate away from her child by her mean husband.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been interpreted in many ways over the years. Modernist critics have applied depth psychology to the story and written about the symbolism of sexual repression in the nursery bars, the chained-down bed, and the wallpaper. Genre critics have discussed the story as an example of supernatural gothic fiction, in which a ghost actually haunts the narrator. But most importantly, feminist critics (re)discovered the story in the 1970s and interpreted it as a critique of a society that subjugated women into the role of wife and mother and repressed them so much that all they could ever hope to be was an "angel in the house."

When her focus eventually settles on the wallpaper in the bedroom and she states, "I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (Gilman 260). As the narrator resigns herself to her intellectual confinement, she begins to see more details in the wallpaper pattern. This can be seen as the slow shift from the connection to her family, friends and colleagues to her focus inward as she sinks deeper into depression. She describes that "—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (Gilman 262). As she focuses inward, sinking deeper into her depression the figure in the wallpaper takes shape and she states that, "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will" (Gilman 264). And she begins to describe the form of a woman behind the wallpaper pattern, "Sometimes I think there are a

"The Yellow Wallpaper," is a larger-than-life version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own personal experiences. She grieved for several years in depression, as her physician diagnosed her with “neurasthenia” and prescribed the "rest cure" seen in the story. Unable to write or seek company, Gilman's rest drove her insane for three months. Gilman wrote the story not simply to change one man's view of neurasthenia, but to utilize the floor as a symbol of the oppression of women in a patriarchal society as mentioned in her article “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860, in the city of Hartford, CT. She would later move to California. She would end her own life in 1935, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought for women’s rights and was an advocate of socialism. She wrote novels, poetry and short stories. She was a woman who was educated; her writing reflected her knowledge, relating to her strong thoughts on woman’s rights and independence and how women of Victorian times suffered from this lack of rights. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys her views on feminism and how women are treated through characters who represent this treatment. The characters she uses help the reader really get drawn into her story;

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story told from the perspective of a woman who’s believed to be “crazy”. The narrator believes that she is sick while her husband, John, believes her to just be suffering from a temporary nervous depression. The narrator’s condition worsens and she begins to see a woman moving from behind the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom. The wallpaper captures the narrator’s attention and initial drives her mad. Charlotte Gilman uses a lot of personal pieces into her short story, from her feministic views to her personal attributes. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written from a feminist and autobiographical standpoint and includes elements, like symbols and perspective that the reader can analyze in different ways.

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

The author shows how much the character needs freedom that the husband prevents her from getting it. This creates the complication and the plot of the story. She goes ahead to enhance it using strong characters and a vivid setting ( the house containing the yellow wall paper) which helps in maintaining the attention of the readers and also attracting more readers. In developing the plot, the author sends a significant amount of time on details and remains focused on it by ensuring that each entry in the journal made by the narrator has a meaning and adds to the overall progress of the story.

The woman behind this work of literature portrays the role of women in the society during that period of time. "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a well written story describing a woman who suffers from insanity and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The author uses her own experience to criticize male domination of women during the nineteenth century. Although the story was written fifty years ago, "The Yellow Wallpaper" still brings a clear message how powerless women were during that time.

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.