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Summary Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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In her short story “Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman implies the oppression of women in 19th century and their anger by using some symbolic meanings associated with its settings.
When Gilman published this story, America was a male-dominated society dating back to the Victorian times which suppressed women’s rights. The domestic ideology prevailed at that time claimed that women are not only subordinated to men but also are different from men. Also, the gender ideology of the day emphasized different characteristic, aptitude, and role of men and women building up discriminative images of gender. According to that ideology, men are active and creative while women are passive, fragile and dependent. For that reason, women are regarded as submissive and only considered as domestic ones.
This point of view on women which defines women as ones who are bounded by domestic life also influenced the medical treatment and Gilman uses this to show social oppression towards women. As the society regarded women as the social ornament of men, idle, delicate images became the virtue of women. As a result, many women felt tedious and restrained. …show more content…

Her first impression of wallpaper was not favorable. Rather, she felt the sense of unknown, disorder, and outrageousness by observing the patterns on the wallpaper. Gilman used this wallpaper to represent the situation of narrator being suppressed by social pressure. At first, narrator didn’t have the slightest idea of what the pattern indicates. However, as the story proceeds, she seems to be absorbed in observing the wallpaper. She found the spot where ‘the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.’, and recognizes ‘a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one’. Finally, she finds a figure of woman on the wallpaper whom she thinks wants to get out of

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In the nineteenth century, woman had no power over men in society. They were limited in their freedom, as their lives were controlled by their husbands. Some women did not mind this lifestyle, and remained obedient, while some rebelled and demanded their rights. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, are short stories that exposes the lifestyle women lived in the nineteenth century. The protagonists from both stories, Jane and Georgiana, similarly lived a male dominated lifestyle.

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During her time in the room she felt the room “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 304). The narrator of the yellow wallpaper descends into madness to escape the cruel dominance of her society. As the story progresses the yellow wallpaper becomes a constant companion. She first dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but after closely studying the pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” and after obsessing over the painting she finds bars hidden.

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