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Use of Symbolism
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Use of Symbolism
Symbolism in literature essay
Animal farm literary analysis on symbolism
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
There are many events that can foreshadow the rest of one’s life for the better, or, for the worst. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane (the narrator) struggles with a mental illness that causes her to become very weak so her husband, John, takes her to a country home to heal. While at the house she stays in a room that has old yellow wallpaper. Jane is deeply disturbed yet highly intrigued and maintains her deep inspections of the wallpaper as she stays there.
During her time in the room she felt the room “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 304). The narrator of the yellow wallpaper descends into madness to escape the cruel dominance of her society. As the story progresses the yellow wallpaper becomes a constant companion. She first dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but after closely studying the pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” and after obsessing over the painting she finds bars hidden.
In Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she tells a horrific ghost story about symptoms of the rest cure. The “rest cure” was a treatment developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who restricted women of intellectual stimuli and condemned them to a domestic life to help their postpartum recovery. After being a victim of this treatment, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Careful attention to the use of Gilman’s symbols in her short story allows the reader to analyze some of the themes concerning feminism and societal misogyny. Foreshadowing throughout, Gilman uses the house, the writing, and the wallpaper as symbols to show how man’s use of the “rest cure” limit women in society and offers that the solution to this issue is to persistently tear away at man’s injustice.
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.
The narrator is a woman who is imaginative trying to make her mind think and realize the meaning of the yellow wallpaper. She describes the wallpaper as, “repellant, almost revolting; smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (Gilman 641). This specific wallpaper makes the narrator feel a certain way. At first, she does not like the color or how it looks. But then not having anything else to do in the room, she starts examining the wallpaper.
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.
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.
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.
Psychoanalytic reading of The Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the speaker seems to be suffering from postpartum depression or "temporary nervous depression." (648). Accordingly, her husband makes the decision for her and takes her to a country house because he believes that it would be good for her. The narrator is not allowed to take care of her own child as she was imprisoned in her room where she should do nothing but "rest."
The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.
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.
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.
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.