The Yellow Wallpaper

The narrator feels very imprisoned in the house and tries to find a way to escape it. During the narrator’s rest cure treatment, she has attached herself to the wallpaper: She would “lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately”(260-261). This was the narrator’s way of escaping the oppression she was in. The wallpaper often seemed confusing to her, but she was determined to figure it out: “I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself”(301-302), everytime John takes of her illness lightly, her interest in the wallpaper grows. This is a direct reflection of her loneliness and isolation from her treatment. The speaker’s rest cure treatment directed her not to do any activities that would make her think intellectually or imaginatively, so she is forced to stay isolated from people, books, and chores. However, as her loneliness grows intensely, she finds relief in writing, something she was told not to do. The narrator would often have to hide the fact that she writes when nobody's around, and when someone comes while she is writing she records “I must not let [them] find me writing”(141-142). The oppression the narrator has been put through has made her stronger mentally, she starts to become more and more possessive of the wallpaper and tries

Most women in America nowadays are lucky enough to consider themselves to be an independent individual, but females were not always guaranteed their freedoms. Throughout the early 1900’s, authors would characterize husbands to be controlling figures. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins demonstrates just how possessive the husband is to his wife in their marriage. This short story shows just how miserable the woman is to be in a marriage with John because John, thinks it would be best that his wife is isolated to get over her postpartum depression.“The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates how a male dominated society leads to the woman not being their own individual by using characterization, narrator perspective, and conflict between women and society.

During the nineteenth century, women and men played vastly different roles. While men had the free will to choose the life paths they desired, women lacked such privileges. Women, instead, were expected to tend to domestic responsibilities. Unlike men, they were unable to voice their opinions, instead, myriads of them lived monotonous lives with their, often condescending, husbands. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, portrays a woman in the nineteenth century descending into psychosis. After the birth of her daughter, the unnamed narrator presumably endures postpartum depression and is forced into bed rest as a cure. In her male-dominated society, the narrator often feels as though she is at a loss of control over her life. Despite what she believes is best for her own betterment, her husband, John, overrides her inputs. She is stripped away from the outside world and left with nothing more than her concealed diary entries and the horrid yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. Although John seemingly wants the best for his wife, his dismissiveness towards her mental state and solicitations necessarily cause her to become deranged; her breakdown is a result of feeling powerless as she is encaged in a house she does not care for, restricted from her activities, and her inability to communicate effectively.

The mood of the story shifted from nervous, anxious, hesitant even, to tense and secretive, and shifts again to paranoid and determination. Her anxiousness is evident whenever she talks to John. She always seems to think for lengthy time when attempting to express her concerns about her condition to him. The mood shift from anxious to secretive is clear when she writes “I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper.” (9). She wants no one to figure out the affect the wallpaper has on her and she wants to be the only one to figure out its pattern. The final mood shift to determination is obvious when she writes “But I am here, and no person must touch this paper but me – not ALIVE!” (11). She is steadfast in attempting to free the woman from the wallpaper. She even goes as far as to lock herself in the room to make sure that she is not interrupted. The major conflicts of this story are the narrator versus John over the nature of her illness and its treatment and the narrator’s internal struggle to express herself and claim independence. During the entire story her and John’s views about her treatment conflict with each other, especially when it comes to her writing. He even makes her stay in the room upstairs instead of in a prettier room downstairs that she would prefer. She often keeps her views to herself or writes them down in

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.

Speculative Essay: The Yellow Wallpaper Supposedly taken place in a large, beautiful, Victorian home, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the brain of a mentally unstable human being. The woman in the story speaks to the audience about the nursery/bedroom she is in, and the people continuously come through the door. Because the narrator of the story is mentally unstable, she is an unreliable source for the reader to depend for information on.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator, Jane, is struggling to deal with her depression that she is suffering in a confined room that her husband, John put her in. John believes that this will cure Jane and make her better from her depression. Instead, Jane is slowly losing herself within the yellow wallpaper in the room causing her to become insane. Jane is not able to express her feelings with her husband or anyone else, but instead she bottles it up inside of her until she could no longer resist. The outsider theme is forced upon Jane from her husband’s way of treatment. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner also portrays the outsider theme

But, it was also a possibility that "Jane" was the actual name of the narrator, a character who remained a nameless example of female social abuse for the entirely of the story. If this "Jane" was, in fact, the narrator, then Gilman said that the narrator's freedom from sanity and the bars of the wallpaper also means an "escape" from her own sense of

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has several major themes that were expressed. In the nineteenth century, women were responsible for doing house chores, taking care of the kids, and obeying their husbands. A general concern regarding women’s inequality during the 19th century was painted by Gilman. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman emphasizes the concerns in which society discouraged the women’s ability to self express themselves. Does the narrator listen to the man because he’s a physician or because he is her husband?

The issue of human sexuality has been discussed since the beginning of writing of human history. Despite our strides towards becoming accepting of people who engage in ‘non-normative’ relationships, whether they be romantic or sexual, there are still issues on the path towards equality. One particular problem is that of women who are interested in the same sex and how they are either ignored or looked down upon, more so than their male counterparts. A majority of the women who had to write under pseudonyms or under the mask of anonymity during the 1800’s could not reveal who they were attracted to and could only live out their fantasies through their writing. And even then they had to be wary of how that aspect was represented in their works,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the most well-known authors of the (insert decade). Her works propelled the feminist movement through stories than chronicled the oppression of struggles of women, the most famous being The Yellow Wallpaper. The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of an unnamed woman descending into madness from the “rest cure” given by her doctor husband. The story alludes to Gilman’s own experiences with the “rest cure,” meant to “cure” her postpartum depression, after which she fell deeper into depression because of it. In the story, the narrator begins to hallucinate, mixing reality with illusion of figures in the wallpaper. Through her use of reality and illusion, Gilman shows the manipulative nature of oppression, how women are manipulated to think against their conscience.

Many women tried every different way to reach women rights and equality. One off the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” from her own experience life and many other liked her. This short story tells about a woman who has a mental and emotionally illness in during the 19th century. At that time women were much more restricted in their activities and also were governed by their husband. Gilman, in “The Yellow Wallpaper described the character as a married women with a newly baby. This woman also like to write and mixed with the society and going to work. But she was for bidden to practice her freedom. This women was struggling with unsymatic marriage, preventing from writing, and therefore she found a substitute outlet through the wallpaper.

There is an agreeable feeling of symbolism that one can acquire from the yellow wallpaper itself. The wallpaper in the Narrator's room speaks to imprisonment and this is made clear when the Narrator says that the weak figure behind appeared to shake the example, pretty much as though she needed to get out. The imprisonment representation is made from the yellow wallpaper in light of the fact that the Narrator over and over asks to evacuate the wallpaper yet isn't permitted so and she is eventually limited to the room she detests because of the stubbornness seen from her husband. The quote demonstrates that the Narrator at last understands that her husband's treatment towards her is sketchy and that she needs to escape her jail like life. Gilman additionally indicates how over the top the Narrator has gotten to be with the wallpaper and why she is so obsessed.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” the husband, John, is conventional for the time. During the 19th-century, men were at the top of the patriarchal order, this meant that his wife, Jane, had no say in what he did for her or to her. Being that John thought nothing was wrong with Jane and he was a well-known physician, he took her to a house for the summer so that she may get some rest.Jane due to circumstances had no say in the matter. John at times was controlling, but at the same time, he loved his wife. Most of his actions were typical of men in this time period and really say a lot about how men treated their wives back then and how they always imagined that they were the divine leaders of the household. Men in this

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Perkins Gilman uses doubles as a way of expressing her dissatisfaction toward the institution of marriage. Gilman does this through the lady in the wall, as well as through John. Gilman uses John as both a mental and physical oppressor to our unnamed narrator. He belittles her; calling her his “blessed little goose” and a “little girl”, taking her agency away from her and, hence, removing any power she has, emphasizing the power imbalance in their relationship. He tells her not to go “walking about like that”; stopping her from leaving the grounds and forcing her to rest in her room allegedly for her own good. This means that our narrator is confined in her bedroom, left to her own meandering thoughts; which leads her to merge with the fictional woman she sees trapped underneath the wallpaper. The woman serves as a double for our narrator; a metaphor for her own struggle and oppression. She describes the woman’s movement as “stooping down...creeping about”: the hard consonants and the harsh, accusatory sounds of the vowels show how scared she is at first. This later morphs into a sort of empathy as she becomes her double, wondering if “[the other women] all came out of the wallpaper like I did”. The narrator’s merging with the supposed woman in the wallpaper shows how she, driven by how oppressed she feels inside her marriage, has been pushed to insanity. It shows how she feels trapped inside her own marriage; the lady reflecting her, and the wallpaper