Who Is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

In Charlotte Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman challenges the unjust patriarchal social system that enforces bias gender roles during the 19th century: wives are forced into oppression by the unrealistic concept that their husbands all know best in all aspects of life and marriage. The text is designed to be read from a feminist viewpoint and is originally published in a woman’s magazine. Gilman utilizes her targeted subjects to help begin an uproar in the feminist movement to help women’s voices to be heard to break the patriarchal dictates set to hold women back by men. Throughout the short story Gilman utilizes the narrator’s feelings of pent up anger towards her own domestic role as a prisoner instead of living in a

During the 19th century women were often placed in imprisonments for the mentally insane for portraying symptoms of what modern society would argue as common medical diagnosis brought on by excess amounts of stress or extreme fatigue. In Gilman’s short story, the narrator mentions to having a child but does not take primary care of the child due to her nerves condition, which in modern society she would be diagnosed as having postpartum depression. Nurseries are designed to inhabit children and the narrator believes the previous residents in the room she now resides in were indeed children, “It was a nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium, I should judge: for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls” (Gilman 527) .The narrator symbolizes the nursery as a woman’s domestic prison, by illustrating the physical appearance of the nursery in a haunting almost ghostly tone. Similar to the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper, the narrator is confined behind the prison-like nursery walls, illuding towards the the domestic expectations placed on women. Expectations that place women within a small frame of what is and is not considered socially acceptable during the time period and what potentially lead women into