For Better Or For Worse: The Madness Of Marriage In Victorian Society

For Better or For Worse: The Madness of Marriage in Victorian Society

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a psychologically thrilling short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, offering a social commentary on women’s freedom of thought during the Victorian era. Gilman tells the story of an unnamed narrator who is locked in a quasi-prison by her domineering husband. The protagonist is given a voice only through the secret writings of her slow, painful decline into madness. This short story perfectly highlights the downfalls of a society completely dominated by males, as well as the cruel and ineffective “treatment” of mental disorders. This theme of female suffocation is repeated throughout the story in three ways: through her husband’s actions, the protagonist’s mental decline, and the physical environment she is kept prisoner in.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman offers a number of literary devices to express the theme of female oppression. To achieve this, Gilman creates a narrator who is both incredibly expressive of her feelings, while also being prone to questioning her own assessments. This in itself is a comment on Victorian female ideologies, as the character’s constant claims that she is going insane further pushes the reader to believe she is an unreliable narrator. This was a common thought shared by men in the Victorian age to devalue and

While it could easily be argued that the narrator killed herself due to her mental instability, there are far too many thinly-veiled political statements made by Gilman’s narrator about the Victorian oppression of a woman for this to be a valid argument. By creating an ambiguous narrator, Gilman forces the reader to reconsider the narrator’s words, forcing her to be heard. As a result of this careful inspection, it becomes clear that the narrator’s misery stems directly from her treatment by her husband, and in turn,