The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Health

A Woman's Mental Health in Symbolism For a long period of time, women in the literary world have been denigrated and treated as inferiors. Women were held to the domestic views of society that their feelings and mental health are not significant. Despite this, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed her radical viewpoints in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which was published in January 1892. “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses multiple examples of symbolism to convey the mental and physical decline of the female protagonist, Jane, who suffers from postpartum depression. Furthermore, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is rich with a plethora of symbolic components that relate to experiences that Jane has encountered due to the deterioration of her mental health.

The protagonist is imprisoned in a bedroom that is first and mainly a representation of her mental state. The bedroom appears like a prison to Jane. In the text, she stated, “for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls" (Gilman 648). The rings most likely stood in for handcuffs and shackles, while the barred windows resembled the bars of a jail cell. Therefore, the rings and barred windows symbolized the suppression Jane felt, locked away as a prisoner of her mind from the outside world. Although the protagonist's husband thought that the room will help her recover from her illness, in actuality, it simply exacerbates her condition. The protagonist's mental state declines, she becomes more fixated on the physical attributes of the space, and she begins to perceive as though the walls are closing in around her. Another example is her nailed bed in her room. The narrator described the nailed bed as a “great immovable bedstead,” which makes it impossible for Jane to move it or have the choice to do so. Correspondingly, the bed stands in for her mental limitations, her inability to overcome them, or her lack of control. Jane can’t overcome her demons and has no control over them, such as how she doesn’t have control over her nailed bed and how to overcome this obstacle. Overall, the symbolism of Jane’s imprisonment emphasizes

As the story progresses, the narrator's hallucinations become more vivid and intense. Jane imagines that there is a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper, and she becomes gripped on setting that woman free. She stated in the story, “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out" (Gilman 652). This can be seen as the narrator's yearning to free herself from her psychological captivity. Paula A. Treichler also agrees with this symbolism by stating in her academic journal, “the woman in the wallpaper represents the narrator herself, gone mad” (64). Not only do the hallucinations themselves serve as a symbolic illustration of Jane’s mental issues, but so does the woman that appears in front of the narrator. The female protagonist, who is also caught up in her psychological conflict, can sympathize with and understand the imprisoned woman in the yellow wallpaper. Finally, Jane decides to free the women in the wallpaper. “she begins to strip off the wallpaper at every opportunity in order to free the woman she perceives is trapped inside” (Treichler 64). Resultantly, Jane's behavior of ripping and tearing at the wallpaper exhibits how she reached a breaking point and allowed it to engulf her. In the end, this depicts how the protagonist's psychological condition is reaching a critical degree as she becomes