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Psychoanalytic Lens In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story about a woman slowly going through depression which causes her to become ill throughout her life due to her husband's authority. An analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's through the feminist and psychoanalytic lenses indicates that the need of self control due to the power of the narrator’s husband which causes her to return to a relationship with the wallpaper. Due to this claim, she has lost the relationship with her husband because she was mistreated through her life. “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the narrator of the story inferiority to her husband, John. The story is based on the belittlement of women in that era. In Karen Ford’s article, she mentions that the “There can be …show more content…

The room she was forced to stay in symbolizes her state of mind. “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!” (Gilman 404). Alternatively of wanting to be in the room she wanted to feel welcomed in, the narrator was forced to stay in the nursery for most of her life. She was cramped to a very vexatious room “whose major features [were] ancient yellow wallpaper, bars on the windows, and a huge bedstead nailed to the floor”(MacPike 287). Her nursery she stayed in had symbolized where she stood in society, people considered her as a dependant woman who was unable to take care of the child she had gave birth to. She, herself, was considered as a child because of what her husband John had put her through. He incised the idea of her child behavior until it got into her mind. While spending time inside the nursery, a notice in her behaviors and they way she acted started to form more childish. “John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs...and read to me…” (Gilman 409). The husband's behaviors towards the narrator pushes her childlike behavior more. “Color played an important role in Gilman’s life...In her writing, too, she used colors for their symbolism” (Wolter 200). The author …show more content…

Using the story through the feminist lens, I noticed that there was actually be a deeper meaning it. I realized that the woman was not crazy, but she wished for equality instead. Her husband kept of putting her down and her insecurities did not make any of it better. She wanted to have her own voice in society, and to make decisions for her own. I also realized that when her husband John told her that he loved her, he was doing it for her betterment, he was actually just brainwashing her into doing everything he would say and for him to take control of her life until she becomes a weak person. He was in control of all of her actions which made him very powerful. However, when the narrator takes the role of her husband, he faints having seen his wife taking control over him and he doesn’t like the idea. As I realized what John was deciding what his wife was able to do and not to do in her life, I immediately thought of myself. For example, when I spent many days over the summer looking for a job, and when I finally found a good place to work at, I decided to get that job position that was open and work somewhere. I thought that it would be a good experience for me and instead of wasting my time at home watching television and get bored out my mind, I could

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In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end.

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Oppression is defined as prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control. Cruel and unjust punishment is just the beginning for the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Charlotte Gilman while writing the “The Yellow Wallpaper” deciding to make it into a series of diary entries from a woman who is suffering from post-partum depression. The narrator begins by describing this large home that she and her husband have rented for the summer. Their summer house stands away from the road and contains many locks and little houses.

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The "windows are barred" (648), and the unmovable bed "that is nailed down" add to her feeling of imprisonment. (650). Thirdly, the narrator suffers from oppression.

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