Symbolism In Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.

She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

As this progresses, the woman starts to go mad from ignorance and starts to believe there is someone behind the Wallpaper. In her room, the narrator starts to obsess over the Wallpaper. The Wallpaper symbolizes women starting to realize how unfair they were treated and how responded to this. As the women’s illness keeps getting subdued by her husband, she starts to go mad and the wallpaper demonstrates this. In the third entry of her diary she says, “Of

The woman was going crazy in her own world as she saw something coming out the yellow wall. The wallpaper had a bright yellow color that drove the narrator crazy and tried to peel it down. The woman was fighting with her mental illness as she explains her influence of her personal life, a woman’s right, and her mental illness. A woman in the early 20th century wrote a story, her story was heard about her mental illness and she had no type of support. The narrator of the story “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” says, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Gilman

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female narrator is greatly troubled by the suppression of her imagination by her husband and her ultimate isolation due to this subordination. These feelings are reflected through the author’s use of setting as the narrator’s dreary and malicious descriptions of the house and the wallpaper mirrors her emotional position. Throughout the reading, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s in-depth loss of touch with reality as she sinks further and further into her own reality. As she becomes more isolated, her descriptions of the house become more abstract as she begins to focus on the wallpaper and starts to see herself as being hidden behind it.

Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.

She knew that even though she had a different opinion, it would not have as much as an impact as her husbands. John had caused Jane to become imprisoned all alone in the room upstairs. She became trapped by her own thoughts, and her physician husband’s solution only worsened her

Moreover, the author admits her visualizations to be eerie and uncanny, when she exclaims, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing”, which shows that she recognizes the absurdity of the situation. The use of an exclamatory sentence displays feelings of desperation since the narrator illustrates the desire to justify her actions. The visualization of the wallpaper as an animated objects creates a connection between the narrator and the wallpaper, as she desperately yearns for help for her problems. The use of a nervous tone through figurative diction shows the narrator’s deterioration of a cognitive abilities as she analyzes the wallpaper through a negative and gruesome lens. The description of the patterns as lifeless also contributes as evidence for her transition from rationality to insanity.

The maids fear their employees terribly, knowing that they are capable of much more than just firing them. The feeling grows in the women when they agree to help write Skeeter's book because they know if it is discovered that they wrote stories about their life as maids for white women and the joys and well as the sorrows that come with the job, they will be at the hands of the deadly white women. The white women have the power to destroy a maid's reputation, making it impossible to find work. Sometimes, the black women fear more than just their occupation. Aibileen mentions this when she says, "She don’t know about them sharp, shiny utensils a white lady use.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.

During her time in the room she felt the room “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 304). The narrator of the yellow wallpaper descends into madness to escape the cruel dominance of her society. As the story progresses the yellow wallpaper becomes a constant companion. She first dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but after closely studying the pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” and after obsessing over the painting she finds bars hidden.

Treatment of women in the 1900s was a really cruel time in history for women, and some short stories that are based on cruelty of women are “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about this women that is really sick and her husband is a doctor and doesn 't believe she is sick, so until she gets better she has to stay inside and can not express her feeling to him so she writes her feelings down in a journal. To begin, In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” In the beginning of the story she was expressing her feelings and saying how her husband is a doctor and believes that she is not sick and won 't take her into the doctor to get treated.

Spencer walked into the office to talk to Marilla about the situation. However, the story states that “After Marilla heard the story about Anne’s past, she felt sorry for the girl and decided to keep her”. I think this will affect her relationship with the orphan because when Matthew first returned with Anne, Marilla didn’t know anything about Anne’s past. Now that Anne told her story, Marilla views Anne in an entirely different way than she had before. Marilla probably felt sorry for Anne and then decided to keep her as shown in the text where it states “She and Matthew never decided to get rid of her.”

The entry shows Anne maturing by Anne seeing what she has wrote and realizing how petty she is being. Anne starts having a better relationship with her mom, after she reads the bad things she wrote and the bad things she said about her mom. There are three reasons I know this. First Anne says “...moods which kept my head under water (so to speak)” and she not looked at things from her mom’s point of view. Anne has let her temper get the best of her and she is starting to notice and feel bad about all the things she has done.

He forces his wife, the narrator, to confront new problems and fix them in more of a restricting way using self imagination and creativity. Although John tries to bypass and escape his problems, this is not the case for his wife who chooses to solve her personal obstacles differently. The narrator is very self aware of her problems in life and despite what her doctor and husband suggest, she tackles them head on by confronting her feelings and issues in her journal. For example, when the narrator says, “I did write for a while in spite of them,” (648). She shows that she knows that hey forbid her from writing, but it is the only way that she knows she will get better.