Yellow Wallpaper Symbolism

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1899, is a semi-autobiographical short story depicting a young woman’s struggle with depression that is virtually untreated and her subsequent descent into madness. Although the story is centered on the protagonist’s obsessive description of the yellow wallpaper and her neurosis, the story serves a higher purpose as a testament to the feminist struggle and their efforts to break out of their domestic prison. With reference to the works of Janice Haney-Peritz’s, “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s

  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality.  This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.

     Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is as a wonderful example of the gothic horror genre. It was not until the rediscovery of the story in the early 1970’s that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was recognized as a feminist indictment of a male dominated society. The story contains many typical gothic trappings, but beneath the conventional façade hides a tale of repression and freedom told in intricate symbolism as seen through the eyes of a mad narrator.

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 narrator has a natural creativity that when left idol drives he insane. She is forced to hide he anxieties and fears which ultimately drives her to insanity. Even though she keeps a journal writing is in particularly off limits. Creativity was forbidden to her, John constantly reminds her to keep it contained. She even writes: “He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” She longs for an outlet for her repressed mind, going as far as to keep the journal, the one the audience is now privy to. She often refers to the journal as her only source of solace. As her sanity deteriorates, her mind starts to imagine things. The wallpaper becomes her outlet for this creativity. She begins describing the mansion as haunted and starts seeing a woman in the walls. She describes this saying: “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 we away from here!” Her natural eventually becomes so repressed it drives her

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, shows the slow progression of madness from the point of view of the person who is going mad. Our narrator, unnamed, but possibly named Jane, says she is sick, as does her doctor and husband, John. This short story can be interpreted in many different ways, but mainly focuses on the oppression of women in the late 1800’s. This woman who is seemly mad journeys through “hell” as she slides deeper into the confines of madness.

The purpose of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to tell the reader that you can have negative effect on someone’s mental health if they are denied their freedom of expression. This is because the narrator (Jane) was kept in a room that had yellow wallpaper, which she did not like. Soon after being unable to work or write Jane began to see creepy figures in the wallpaper and everyday it got worse, she soon began to see a women trapped in the wallpaper. This began to feed her hallucinations and paranoia that someone else is going to find out about this women, and help her escape the yellow wallpaper. This made Jane insane, she would see women walking around outside, and she soon became addicted to the room and writing about the wall in her journal.

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

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.

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.

For centuries women in literature have been depicted as weak, subservient, and unthinking characters. Before the 19th century, they usually were not given interesting personalities and were always the proper, perfect and supportive character to the main manly characters. However, one person, in order to defy and mock the norm of woman characterization and the demeaning mindsets about women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." This story, through well crafted symbolisms, brought to surface the troubles that real women face. Her character deals with the feeling of being trapped by the expectations of her husband, with the need to do something creative or constructive, and to have a mind and will of her own. These feelings

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, portrays a woman who has postpartum depression and is confined to her bedroom with atrocious yellow wallpaper. Gilman writes from a time when women were oppressed and not taken seriously in social context. Her depiction of a depressed woman who is imprisoned in a room by her husband represents the societal oppression of women in the patriarchal society of the American nineteenth century. This story is not merely a gothic horror as many critics have stated; although, the story does hold aspects like a broken mind and imprisonment, the story is not completely a gothic horror. Paula A. Treichler also interpreted this story as as a feminist cry rather than a gothic horror when she stated the story is “a fictional challenge to the patriarchal diagnosis of women’s condition, it is also a public critique of a real medical treatment.” (“Escaping the Sentence” 70). The author depicts a feminist story that brings to light the social inequality women faced through descriptive diction of the husband, setting both within and outside of the bedroom, and the structure and symbolism of nine breaks in the story.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born in 1860, was a very influential feminist author and advocate for social reform. Her most famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, marks a turning point in American literary history. A woman is diagnosed with postpartum depression, and is prescribed with a “rest cure”. This “cure” forbade her from going outside, participating in any leisurely activity, and even from seeing her newborn child. This left her alone to sleep, try to convince her husband to let her go outside, and stare at the wall. The story is told through the narrator’s thoughts in the form of diary entries, often expressing her resentment of her husband and the doctor. She finds the peeling, yellow wallpaper off putting, and wants to tear it all off. After being isolated for so long, she starts to hallucinate, seeing the figure of a woman behind the wallpaper. She frees the imaginary figure, a reflection of the narrator’s situation in the story. Because of this, she now knows her feelings of not wanting to be trapped, as a moment of realization. This ending mirrors the themes of past transcendentalist stories.

It is the wallpaper, alive and a character in itself, that charges our main character 's mind and helps her break free from the dull and husband driven life she has been living. The wallpaper itself, so marvelously described, becomes our storyteller 's best enemy and best friend. More like a mirror, this yellow consuming wallpaper reflects what our main character is really going through and feeling and the woman that stirs and creeps within the wall is literally herself which is found out by us, the readers, when the housekeeper mentions the yellow stains on all of her clothes. She wants to tear the confining wallpaper down that holds this imaginary woman in just as she wants to tear the confining way of life her husband has chosen for her. The story continues to progress as she deconstructs and analyses the wallpaper until the climax when our main character locks herself in the yellow room to finally tear all of the wallpaper down so that the woman can never be put back and imprisoned forever. The story concludes with her husband fainting, and our main character "creeping" and paying him no concern at all except that once again he is in her way but this time, not able to stop her voyage along the wall and for the rest of her life.

In her mind, she is creeping around the house slowly obeying the laws and taking caution against John’s controls and restrictions of her so as to obey his laws. The yellow walls would be representative of his warning sign to her that he is in control and she must adhere. For example, the narrator states, “The color of the wallpaper is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman 747). This description of yellow may put an image in the reader’s mind of unclean, unattractive, and unhealthy things.