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Understanding Mary's Mental State In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Cost of Suppression: Understanding Mary's Mental State in The Yellow-Wallpaper

In a short-story ahead of it’s time, an unwell wife named Mary experiences near constant suppression and mistreatment. Her male counterpart and lifetime companion John, undermines her mental and physical abilities to such an extent that she is driven to extreme measures. This societal oppression becomes apparent when a deeper look is taken into what “equality" used to look like. A textbook example that perfectly represents how unjust day to day life was for women, is Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s, The Yellow Wall-Paper. Published in 1892 this work of feminist literature sheds light on the societal and cultural oppression experienced by women during the late 19th …show more content…

Mary's visions of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper can be interpreted as a metaphor for her own confinement within the patriarchal system. “Nobody could climb through that pattern.” (Stetson, 8). This ‘woman behind bars’ hallucination implies that women cannot escape a system engineered to work in favour of men, none of them can climb through and overcome oppression. Furthermore, her hallucinations and delusions can be seen as a coping mechanism for dealing with the trauma of her oppression. Mary internalizes her own oppression by projecting it onto the woman she perceives behind the wallpaper, leading her to take extreme measures to ensure that John does not trap her again, exclaiming that she has “got out at last.” (Stetson, 10). This can be inferred as escaping the cycle of overruling and silencing. Collectively, her obsession with the wallpaper embodies her desire to get away from the gender norms that she is forced into and escape her inequitable lifestyle. “And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Stetson, 10). She mentally achieves this desire when she destroys the metaphysical representation of her

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