Repression In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper and Repression In a multitude of ways, people are constantly being held back and suppressed. Now this could just be seen as the way of life and too often a time it is, but that’s not to say that being subjugated to this doesn’t have its effects. Sigmund Freud once said that “unexpressed emotions will never die; they are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” Obviously this is true whether it occurs to someone or not and it explains perfectly how the force of repression will take its toll and arise in an unpleasant way later on. There are of course several different types of repression though emotional repression is unbelievably common. In Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character is

When the main character and her husband move into their temporary house, she is very distraught by the wallpaper in the room she is put into. This causes her to fuss about it and instead of her husband asking why it could be bothersome, he merely brushes it off with a chuckle. In fact he “laughs at [her] so about [the] wall-paper! (Gilman, 2)”. This is a wonderful example on how the she is repressed because this wallpaper truly does antagonize her. When someone is being antagonized, it is customary for a loved one to try and ease their pain to make them comfortable but this does not happen in the main characters marriage. The pain she is enduring is being ignored and dismissed therefore creating an even greater problem which results in an unresolved conflict in her subconscious. This unresolved problem is a driving force in the story. It shows the reader the repressive ideologies the husband, John, lives by and the detrimental effects it has on the main character. Leading into this is the unresolved conflict. Her conflict is with the wallpaper yet the conflict is swept under the rug advancing to an unresolved