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Depiction of Culture in The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Culture of The Yellow Wallpaper Through her many stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, developed the notion of how being a strong independent woman can be inspirational to all. The expression of her personal feelings and opinions behind the guise of a seemingly fictional story brings new life to the story itself. During the nineteenth century, there were many stereotypes of what was expected from women. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman composes the story of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression and finds an infatuation with a wall covered with yellow wallpaper. Seeing that Gilman herself has experienced this form of mental illness, we can analyze the context of the text and see the reflection of her own life through …show more content…

Gilman, being an active feminist, encouraged women to be independent and promoted the idea that no woman needed a man to tell her what to do and how to do it. Charlotte Gilman had quite the life growing up, in part because her father abandoned the family when she was young. Being a single mother, this forced them to move around quite a bit. As a young adult, Gilman was madly in love with a man by the name of Charles Stetson. They had two children together, however there were complications with their first-born. “Soon after her marriage to Charles Stetson and the birth of her daughter, she fell into a deeply depressed condition and consulted Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who in turn prescribed his famous rest cure. It is her experience with Mitchell’s treatment that inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” (On Feminism and The Yellow Wallpaper). Gilman was able to insert her own ideas on feminism into her story based on her real life experiences. The exception being the relationship with her husband, John. The factual exile to the upstairs of the vacation home certainly did not display the feminism to which Gilman proclaimed. Even with the added fictional aspects to her story, Gilman is able to understand and relate to the women in her story. This is clearly conveyed through her detailed and imaginative writing. She truly gives the reader an in depth, literal and figurative look at the struggles women

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The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”

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