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Descent Into Madness In Charlotte Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ depicts the restrains that were imposed …show more content…

She begins to see strangles heads in the wallpaper, which can be a symbolic representation of the patriarchal order that stifled women. The bars on the wallpaper that cage the imaginary women are a reflection of her own situation where she is confined in the old mansion. Even the smell of the wallpaper, which she describes as being ‘yellow’ and present throughout the house, is a reflection of the mental repression that is always present in her life. She is so consumed by the smell that she thinks about burning the old mansion just to cover it …show more content…

The repressed self is released out by detaching from reality. This detachment allows her to be free from social norms as her madness now allows her to no longer conform to cultural bounds. Her final protest, thus, comes out in the form of insanity. She can now escape from the cage of her husband by refusing to accept her identity as a repressed woman. This text thus brings to focus the dark theme that cultural and social expectations of women are so rigid that the protagonist has to give up her identity as a sane woman to finally achieve the freedom she is denied through

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Abstract Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Susan Glaspell's Trifles piece the themes of the risky nature of repression, the treatment of women, and isolation. Both women are victims of a domestic prison and a prison for their own mind, created by society and their husbands, who are sufferers themselves in a way, of a Gilded Age mentality. The women have no voice, authority, or ability to make their own decisions. Their intellect and inspiration is considered a lighthearted obstacle and a interference from their only jobs as homemakers. There is satire in the conclusions of these stories in that the victims/women turn the tables on their oppressors.

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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.

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She feels trapped and there is no way for her to escape. Eventually Jane starts to see the faces of women trapped behind the bars of the paper. She realizes that the image in the wallpaper is not another woman; it is herself as well as all women in general who are trapped by

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Women’s freedom of expression and independence is deniably the theme of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Hastily the narrator says, “There Comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me writing a word” (Gilman 649). Particularly, John would rather her not have her own thoughts about things, rather his own. Allowing her to sit in boredom of the resting cure away from any excitement. However, the narrator feels as though journaling gives her a way out and the

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the tale of a nameless, sick woman who was confined to a colonial mansion's old nursery to recuperate from, as the Doctors at the end of the 19th century named it, "a slight hysterical tendency" (Teichler 1984: 61, Geilman 1997: 1-15.). As the title says, the yellow wallpaper covering the walls in this room is a vital part of the story, and as Beth Brunk-Chavez suggests in her article on Studies in Pop Culture, even if these walls "do not actually "talk", at least [they can] come alive to reveal something once hidden or papered over" (Brunk-Chavez 2003: 71, Lupton 2006: 403). This "living" wallpaper is a vital part of the main character's narration, illustrates the progress

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“The Yellow Wallpaper “written by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is a phycological and feminist masterpiece. Gillman a women’s right activist, mother, wife, and writer lived in a time where women were kept in a position that prevented them from existing outside one’s home life. Women were subjugated and degraded during this time, and this inequality and prison like conditions created the feeling of trapped or confined in one’s own family often leading to mental breakdown or illness. This subjection of women led Charlotte Perkins Gillman to the conclusion that women were being hindered from having both intelligent and creative growth.

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Her descriptions of the room, with the furniture seemingly being nailed to the floor and the windows being “barred” show an underlying understanding that her thoughts and personality is being confined. The irony present in this description, due to her belief that the room used to be a nursery, shows her early denial of her husband’s dominance over her. As the story progresses and she begins to see the woman behind the wallpaper, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s realization that she is the one that is actually being suppressed. The descriptions of the wallpaper, showing how confining it is for the symbolic woman behind it, shows how the narrator is being trapped by those bars in both her marriage and in her mental illness. Thus when she says, “At night in any kind of light… it becomes bars,” the reader is shown how restricted the narrator feels, reflected through the wallpaper.

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The narrator is then confined to her room with the Yellow Wallpaper and slowly becomes her only obsession. “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream” (Gilman 798).

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Thirdly, the yellow wallpaper of the nursery itself symbolizes the domestic life that traps women in line with family, medicine and tradition imposed on by the patriarchal society of the Victorian era. The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on the interiors of walls. These elements signify the scrutiny this 19th-century Western 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 highly active imagination 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

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Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

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At first it is seen as nothing but an old ruined wallpaper with a “bad” pattern. As the story progresses she stares at the paper for hours and sees a sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. She hen sees a desperate woman trying to leave the wallpaper which shows how the women feel trapped. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol of the oppressive life that many women have today and back then.

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