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Yellow Wallpaper Inequality

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The dystopian story “The Yellow Wallpaper” analyzes the struggle for equal rights of women and their quest for freedom. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story shows the idea of equality and treatment of women in the late 1800’s. The story explores the intense impact of status and power on rights of gender and mental health. This is shown in several ways throughout the story by John, the narrator’s husband who imprisons her, and the environment in which the narrator is placed in. These elements throughout the story exemplify the inequality of women and the control held over them by men at this time. The character’s in the story, such as the narrator who is nameless, is presented as having a mental illness and is imprisoned by her husband. The narrator has the persona of suffering and slowly begins to …show more content…

The wallpaper is very much personified, “Those two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” The wallpaper is watching the narrator and changes; she sees women behind the paper, but only in the moonlight. “The yellow wallpaper has some kind of sub pattern, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights.” There are women trapped behind the wallpaper. “There are so many of those creeping women, I wonder if they all came out of the wallpaper as I did.” The narrator thinks she is one of those women and wants to get out. The narrator being trapped in the room has slowly made her insane and wants to step out to freedom. “I am really quite fond of this room, but all of this horrid paper.” This quote shows that the narrator wants to be free, just like the other women in this time period. They felt trapped and wanted to be equal. “I’ve got out at last. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can never put me back!” The narrator is trapped, and when she peels off the wallpaper she is stepping out to

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In the Yellow Wallpaper, the Woman does not have this bond, and instead sinks further into her own nightmarish fantasy. As a child, the woman had an active imagination as she writes, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store” (Gilman 135). In her isolation, she is unable to do almost anything, and the only thing she can do entertain herself with her imagination. Her isolation causes her to see women in the wallpaper as she writes, “ The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”(143).

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The main character is quiet, always following orders during the day, but at night she creeps; creeps on to the very edge of the wallpaper to converse with the women trapped inside, for "by daylight, she is subdued" (245). The protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" thoroughly describes how the absence of light changes the paper, claiming "it changes as the light changes" (244) though it is only her perception of it that is distorted. There is a quality to the wallpaper that disturbs her inner being, "things in that paper that nobody knows"

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