Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper

Women!!! Wanting to be control is a necessity to many, but in the end it can harm others. In the gothic story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, several gothic elements contribute to show how gender roles fall upon a husband and wife. These gender roles are what cause to women in distress. The woman, who is also the narrator, becomes mentally insane causing self-damage due to her husband, John. Since it is human nature to strive for a feeling of power and control, this woman suffers through the feeling of being overpowered, thinking low of her social status, and eventually symbolic hallucinations because of him.

Women often can feel threatened by a powerful, impulsive, and tyrannical man, as if they have no control of

The yellow wallpaper in the room the narrator despises, is a reflection of women’s status in society, being trapped under the power of males. The narrator lost all of her freedom to John. John has gotten to such a point of control where she cannot even pick who she can spend time with and where she can sleep. After John told her she could not, the narrator started writing down her thoughts and her mental illness was getting so bad to the point where there has been “things in that paper that nobody knows but [her].” The narrator is now completely insane because of her husband. She is hallucinating and seeing other human beings, female human beings in the yellow wall, trapped, just like her. Staring at the wall, the narrator made out a “faint figure behind [the wall acting] as if she wanted to get out.” This is the narrator, seeing herself. She has created this woman in her mind that is trapped, because in reality, that confinement is what the narrator is feeling herself. There is that one thing holding them back, John, who symbolizes the wallpaper. Women live in a trapped world, where they do not always have their own freedom. There is always a person that wants that control and power and in this case, that person was John. He over abused his power and took it to far. The woman is having a mental breakdown, realizing how that figure she sees is crawling, low to the