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The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to convey the theme that you can not force a curious mind into inactivity without it going crazy. In the story, the narrator is forced to stay in a room with an eerie yellow wallpaper because her husband says that that will cure her sickness. The narrator then gets captivated by the wallpaper, analyzing it every chance she gets, causing her to go insane. The yellow wallpaper is personified to help better symbolize a barrier in her creativity caused by her husband. Gilman chooses to have the wallpaper symbolize a barrier to the narrator’s creativity because the narrator has been stripped of her creativity and is using the wallpaper to be creative once again. Throughout the story, the narrator analyzes the wallpaper, seeing new things …show more content…

At first, she just sees new shapes and patterns in the wallpaper but after a while, she starts to see this woman who appears to be stuck in the wallpaper. Gilman personified the woman to show the reader that this woman in the wallpaper represents her and how she is stuck in the situation she is in. While she is consciously seeing this woman in the wallpaper trying to free herself, the narrator is subconsciously trying to free herself from the 2 barrier of her creativity she’s been put in. She then rips the wallpaper down to not only save this woman but to also save herself from the barrier put on her. Gilman also uses personification on the yellow wallpaper to make it seem stalker-like. This can be seen in the phrases, ”It creeps all over the house.” and, ”You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are.” These show that she is not only creeped out by the wallpaper but also trying to figure it out. This causes the narrator to feel as if she will never be free from the yellow wallpaper and that she is always being watched. The feeling of always being watched as well as not being

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