Literary Devices In The Yellow Wallpaper

Freedom has been defined by many as an individual who is not being enslaved or imprisoned by a third party and having the power to speak, act, or think on their own accord. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she uses the literacy elements such as imagery and symbolism in order to convey the theme of the significance of self-expression and the freedom to do so. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, in the short story is confined to a single room in a large house after her husband, a respected physician, orders her to rest as much as possible. As she is isolated, she establishes a desire to self-express and develop her mind in any way. Writing is specifically off limits and John cautions her a couple of times that she must use her self-control to restraint her imagination, which of course, the narrator eventually succumbs to insanity due to the repression of her imaginative influences. The first indication of

It is not a mere coincidence that the woman in the wallpaper is ensnared behind a design. Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman demonstrates how a person’s isolation and restriction to freely express their own uniqueness can lead to undesirable results such as hallucinations and insanity. The narrator’s mind is restrained from reading and writing, therefore her mind in its place turns to her surroundings and settles upon the wallpaper as an intellectual task and literacy imagination that she obsess over to an unhealthy degree, which is the only place she can maintain some control and exercise the power of her imaginative mind. By having the woman, whom the narrator imagines, be seen as though she is trapped behind a pattern is merely a more straightforward personification of that metaphorical restriction of self-expressing, creativity, and desire to be independence. For Gilman, a person’s mind that is kept isolated without any intellectual activities is condemned to self-destruct just like a ticking