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Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

710 Words3 Pages

Charlotte Gilamans short story brings us through a first hand experience of a woman suffering through what appears to be postpartum depression, and the isolation her husband is putting her through in order to try and cure her. The more time she spends isolated in the room the more she can see within the wallpaper. Not only does this short story do a great job at showing the stigma associated with mental illness among women in patriarchal societies, but also spreading awareness on her own experiences being part of a treatment called “the rest cure”. In this time period there were strict gender roles in place that women were expected to follow and if they didn’t fit into these gender roles they could be seen as mentally unstable. The main …show more content…

She increasingly becomes more fixated on the wallpaper the more she spends alone in the room. She first saw eyes in the wallpaper, then actual people in the wallpaper. She first describes the wallpaper as “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” , and “The color is repellent, almost revolting” which shows her irritation and resentment towards this treatment at first. But the story goes on and she becomes more fixated and begins seeing a woman in the wallpaper representing her being trapped within the restrictions her husband has given her and the expectations of a patriarchal …show more content…

Symbolism is used a lot as the whole point of the wallpaper is to symbolize her entrapment and mental decline. Personification and imagery was used on the wallpaper to bring it to life. “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had”, “Up and down sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes everywhere”, “The paint and paper looks as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper-in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw worse paper in my life”. I feel these quotes do a really good job using imagery and personification to highlight her increasing obsession with the wallpaper leading her into

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While the wallpaper, its pattern, and the woman could also represent the narrator’s mind and her feelings of being trapped. There are so many interpretations that you can not just pick one, but in this case I

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The wallpaper represents how the narrator feels on the inside. She feels trapped, afraid, and alone from everyone-including her husband,

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This observation also serves as the narrator recognizing the paper’s, or boundary’s, relevance to herself; she sees a “woman”--a reflection of herself--trapped behind the paper, confined by that thin line that separates herself from total insanity. Her behavior becomes obsessive: she keeps a constant vigil of the wallpaper at night, and claims that the woman behind the wallpaper “is all the time trying to climb through” (348). And the narrator aids her escape--as soon as she is given the opportunity: “I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (349). The destruction of the wallpaper is symbolic of her fully delving into the world of insanity. From this point

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story written in 1892. The story is centered around a woman who faces societal expectations, and how men controlled women’s decisions simply because men were superior at the time. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates how the lack of self-determination can have a negative impact on mental health by showing how men controlled women’s decisions through the use of narration and imagery. Initially, the protagonist is portrayed as a woman who suffers from postpartum depression or a “nervous condition.”

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It's yellow color symbolizes the way the narrator feels about her situation. "Unclean", "dull", "sickly" is how she may have felt deep down about her relationship with her husband and the life she lived under him. The wallpaper itself becomes a symbol for her. She uses it as a coping method and projects her feelings onto it and the woman she sees in it. The windows symbolize how she is trapped in this marriage and she can only view the beautiful outside through the many windows, reminding her of what she cannot have.

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The wallpaper becomes a symbol of the narrator's own mental state. She describes it as "dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. " This description mirrors the narrator's own mental state, which is confused and erratic.

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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

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She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

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Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

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It 's here where she discovers the yellow wallpaper that leads to her mental demise. What is the symbolic meaning of the yellow wallpaper and how do her interactions with the wallpaper represent the change in her feelings towards her husband and society. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes women 's suffrage and the struggles women went through, and her interactions with the wallpaper represent the problems woman had with their husbands and society. The main symbolism present in the story is how the yellow wallpaper represents woman suffrage and the problems they endured during the 19th century.

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The vast majority of people wouldn’t give the wallpaper much thought, however the narrator becomes obsessed with it. To the narrator, the wallpaper is alive and becomes the focus of all her time. Her overwhelming lure to the wallpaper becomes obvious when she first provides a very vivid description stating “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (217-218). As she begins to lose her grip on reality, the narrator beings to see faces and eventually a woman within the wallpaper. At first, her description of seeing faces in the wallpaper seems like it could be her mind making since of the varying patterns or just part of her imagination.

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(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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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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Personification, imagery, and tone are all used here to emphasize the woman losing her mind and all sense of reality because she and the ‘woman’ in the wall are ripping apart the wallpaper. Finally in the end the tone

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