Universal Truth In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end. The narrator is certain she is really sick, and not just nervously depressed as diagnosed by her husband, but she is confined by her role as a wife and woman, and cannot convince her relatives and friends that something is actually wrong with her. In the story the narrator says, “”If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the

Gilman incorporates the literary techniques of tone and diction to provide the reader with a clear understanding of how the narrator falls into the beliefs of society, while she is confined and oppressed by her husband’s diagnosis of her being “Nervously Depressed”. Gilman’s use of both techniques allows the work to come together as a whole, and demonstrates the idea that women are content with living in a world were men is seen as more intelligent, able-minded and higher in standard than woman,