Symbolism In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Characterization and Symbolism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

In Charlotte short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Charlotte Gilman take on the conventions of the psychological horror take to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage. “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses on the encounter between the husband and wife. This Encounter which takes place when the narrator or Jane started to suffer from nervous depression and of her marriage with her husband john who is also her doctor that belittles both her illness and her thoughts and concerns in general which approaches to marriage back then. Gilman employs characterization and symbolism to highlight the difference between the character and her marriage life,

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it (16). Confirming that it exists for her not only as object of property like a haunted house, but also as the place of where she lives and how she feels about her marriage. Her description of herself shows a young, upper middle-class woman, newly married and a mother, who is undergoing care for depression. The narrator whose name may or may not be jane is highly imaginative and a natural storyteller, though her doctors believe she has a slight hysterical tendency. In other words, she knows the reality of what is going on with her and accepts it, even if her husband and family thinks there is nothing wrong with her. If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do? My brother is also a physician, and of high standing, and he says the same thing (9). Towards the end of the story the narrator finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in the wallpapers, she can see that other woman are forced to creep and hide behind the domestic patterns of their lives, and that she herself is the one in need of rescue. The horror of this story is that the narrator must lose herself to understand herself. She has untangled the pattern of her life, but she has torn herself apart in getting herself free of the constraints of her marriage her

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is drive by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Realistically, the wallpaper is simply an ugly pattern. Unpleasing to the eye, with no coherence. It catches attention with its seemingly random lines, and according to Jane the composition doesn’t follow any type of artistic rule. Blank white eyes that never change their viewpoint. White, like the blind. Broken necks and bulging eyes, surely that of a dead person. This pattern in the wallpaper represents those that are content to live out the lives outlined for them, never truly seeing the potential of woman, and the ridiculousness of the gender roles. So inclined to live a domesticated life, so robotic and repetitive that it’s almost zombie like, essentially dead to the world. The pattern of the wallpaper also symbolizes the pattern of oppression of woman society follows. It goes on and on and makes no sense. The continuity of it all follows a set pattern of sexism. Color of the wallpaper when something is yellowed due to age and decay, it looks gross. Like teeth that have seen many days of smoking, the wallpaper has probably gone quite a long time remaining unclean and abused by time and tenants. Symbolically, this reinforces that gender roles and treatment of mental illness are ugly. The