The Narrator In The Yellow Wallpaper

676 Words3 Pages

In the early 1900s, it was a man’s world; everything was controlled by men and the women were just supposed to clean, cook, and produce children. Many women had a nervous disorder, meaning they were nervous about everything, or they had crippling depression where they couldn’t seem to accomplish anything without being upset. Numerous women were sent to male doctors, there were few female doctors at this time, for these disorders; the doctors almost always prescribed the rest cure, intending that the women would do little to no work and just rest. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which Gilman uses various literary devices that helps to show how the narrator is becoming fixated on the wallpaper as well as deranged …show more content…

In the beginning, she doesn’t really touch the wallpaper in anyway. She sits there and analyzes the wallpaper trying to discover something in the wall that doesn’t exists. The author hyperbolizes the amount of times the narrator looked over the wallpaper, claiming it was for the thousandth time. Gilman does this to express that the narrator is sitting there looking over the wallpaper again and again trying to find something different about it or understand what the wallpaper means. The Narrator goes into great depth about how the lighting is in the room and how it affects her surroundings. She pays so much attention to the lighting in the room that it keeps her quiet the whole day because how interested she is in the wallpaper. She gets so easily amused by watching and analyzing the lighting and wallpaper that it keeps her busy for hours. Charlotte puts in the lighting to symbolize the changes in the narrators mind. In the bright lights of the daytime the narrator is either sleeping or thinking, but in the darkness where only moon or candle light shine she is awake and watching the wall paper closely or watching John , her husband,