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An Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Recommended: Feminist literary critique of the yellow wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, telling a story about women’s struggles against a male-centric society. It clarifies that her good meaning, but oppressive husband John who pushes the nameless character to madness in attempt to help her while also showing that the behavior protocols could have devastating effects on women during the time period. While this is condescending behavior to the readers, when the story came out this was accepted and quite normal. The tone, images, and metaphors in the story show a woman triumphing in the only way she can over the repressive patriarchy.

The basic plot of the Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper revolves around a woman who is diagnosed with nervous hysteria when actually suffering from postpartum …show more content…

At first the yellow wallpaper is just an “artistic sin”-(Pg.420) but the narrator uses language that is metaphoric with “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”-(Pg. 421) The main character herself can feel like the “lame uncertain curves” and it is possible that she has the fear of suicide. In the story later on when the wallpaper becomes more active in the narrator’s mind and is trying to follow the pointless pattern to some kind of conclusion with “they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror.”-(Pg. 424) This is the narrator trying find her own conclusion in her own life. The “formless sort of figure”-(Pg. 423) eventually becomes “a woman stooping down and creeping about the pattern.”-(Pg.425) This is the main character who is behind the pattern and we learn this at the end of the story when the character says ‘I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”-(Pg. 431) The narrator of the story at first only sees a formless figure, then a woman, and eventually she becomes the woman herself. This shows the slow degradation of her mind and the only way she can escape the control of her

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