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Depiction of Culture in The Yellow Wallpaper

2142 Words9 Pages

The Culture of The Yellow Wallpaper Through her many stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, developed the notion of how being a strong independent woman can be inspirational to all. The expression of her personal feelings and opinions behind the guise of a seemingly fictional story brings new life to the story itself. During the nineteenth century, there were many stereotypes of what was expected from women. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman composes the story of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression and finds an infatuation with a wall covered with yellow wallpaper. Seeing that Gilman herself has experienced this form of mental illness, we can analyze the context of the text and see the reflection of her own life through …show more content…

Gilman, being an active feminist, encouraged women to be independent and promoted the idea that no woman needed a man to tell her what to do and how to do it. Charlotte Gilman had quite the life growing up, in part because her father abandoned the family when she was young. Being a single mother, this forced them to move around quite a bit. As a young adult, Gilman was madly in love with a man by the name of Charles Stetson. They had two children together, however there were complications with their first-born. “Soon after her marriage to Charles Stetson and the birth of her daughter, she fell into a deeply depressed condition and consulted Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who in turn prescribed his famous rest cure. It is her experience with Mitchell’s treatment that inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” (On Feminism and The Yellow Wallpaper). Gilman was able to insert her own ideas on feminism into her story based on her real life experiences. The exception being the relationship with her husband, John. The factual exile to the upstairs of the vacation home certainly did not display the feminism to which Gilman proclaimed. Even with the added fictional aspects to her story, Gilman is able to understand and relate to the women in her story. This is clearly conveyed through her detailed and imaginative writing. She truly gives the reader an in depth, literal and figurative look at the struggles women

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The Yellow Wallpaper Critical Lens Analysis

1299 Words | 6 Pages

While in her way to “recovery” in the mansion she climbs up Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs in a negative way until she reaches the top which drove her to madness. While she goes up the ladder, she continues to build her own world inside the room where the yellow wallpaper is located and when she finally finishes her own world and breaks free instead of letting her husband build her the world she wants. As said before, Gilman used her writing abilities to expose her readers to controversial topics in that era, women were leaving in a man’s world, therefore she spread awareness and encourage their readers of what a woman really wants, her ideas are projected into her characters and their development throughout the story just like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that represented women all around the world. Gilman spoke for all oppressed women whenever she wrote stories that her readers could feel a connection with, she was also an example of how woman can build their own world themselves without the need of a man. Malala Yousafzai once

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In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane is a mentally ill woman whose surroundings are only worsening her condition. Jane’s husband, a physician, thinks that a change of scenery will benefit her condition and takes it upon himself to relocate to a summer home, not knowing that this new environment will be Jane’s downfall. The entire story is written as a journal, inscribed by Jane whenever she can stealthily disobey her husband to write. Gilman writes the story from Jane’s point of view to coax the reader into a deeper understanding of Jane’s mental battles and the overall theme of oppression. Gilman’s choice of style for this short story exponentially enhances the effectiveness of the text because the reader is opened

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829 Words | 4 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses naturalism as evident through her characterization of characters as victims from forces beyond control and as caricatures of animalistic behaviors to make her point about the oppression of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In this piece of work, the main character is struggling with a form of depression likely imposed from her oppressive husband and society. While trying to explain her illness to her husband, who is a physician, she is basically dismissed as being hysterical and having nothing wrong. She continues to seek support from her husband only to find opposition. She enjoys writing and seeks intellectual stimuli as possibly helping her with her melancholy, but is only turned against it by her husband,

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1480 Words | 6 Pages

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The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”

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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.

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1091 Words | 5 Pages

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810 Words | 4 Pages

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