Symbolism and Imagery in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper” author Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a fictionalized account of a woman’s descent into madness which is based on her mental breakdown resulting from a failing marriage. Born in Hartford, Connecticut and raised by her mother, Charlotte became a prominent American feminist, sociologist, writer and advocate for social reform. Her declining mental health became such a concern to her husband, Charlotte had herself committed to a mental asylum. She entrusted her care to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who prescribed isolation and rest.
The protagonist of the story, a woman suffering from postpartum depression, is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper that she finds increasingly oppressive and disturbing. The wallpaper symbolizes the patriarchal society that confines women to prescribed roles and suppresses their creativity and autonomy. The protagonist's obsession with the wallpaper represents her own descent into madness, as she struggles against the constraints of her society and her own mental illness. Both stories show how women are oppressed by patriarchal societies and how that oppression has a profound impact on their mental and emotional well-being. The symbols used in both stories convey the sense of confinement and the destruction of potential that comes with that oppression.
Symbolism Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper One might know that Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses the wallpaper in the main character’s room as a symbol for a bigger underlying meaning. This is a short story about a young women diagnosed of depression and “a slight hysterical tendency”. In hopes of healing the narrator, her husband moves them into an old, ornate home for the summer and required her to refrain from any activity to calm her mind. However, instead of getting better, the narrator goes into a deeper level of madness. This madness is caused by her obsession over what she believes is animate patterns and a trapped women in a peeling, aged wallpaper in her room.
I found this to be relevant for me as a woman, and also still current as gender roles are very prominent in my household. The story's protagonist is an unnamed female narrator that is confined to a room by her husband because of her "nervous condition”. As she spends more time in the room, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and gradually descends into madness. I believe that her confinement to the room represents the societal restrictions placed on women during that time (1890’s; submissive, self-sacrificing, obedient, “feminine”), and the yellow wallpaper itself is to be a prominent symbol that signifying’s her confinement, the oppression she was undergoing, along with the mental deterioration she was experiencing. As she becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper we can see her mental state declining as a reflection, which further emphasizes the theme of psychological torment and the unraveling of the human
Settings function as a symbol and how it relates to the symbolism of the novel is chief to understanding the novel. The setting of the deteriorating house acts as a symbol for the deteriorating lives of the Lisbon girls. The narrator depicts, “As he lifted rugs and threw out towels, he unleashed the odors of the house in waves, and many people thought he wore the surgical mask to protect himself not from dust but from the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands” (222). In this way the setting of the girls in a deteriorating house just mirrors the deterioration of the girls as they slip into a deep depression. The setting
The story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and published in the year 1891 (Gilman). The Yellow Wall-Paper starts out as the narrator who is a nameless character and an upper middle class mother who is suffering from depression. The story is told through journal entries where she writes down her thoughts and she uses the journal as her source of freedom from the room she feels “trapped” in. Throughout the story, Gilman uses symbolism and imagery to truly convey the meaning of the sick and restrictive society. Symbolism is the use of symbols to represent ideas and emotions.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells about a woman who suffers from depression and anxiety. Over time the woman’s mental health seems to steadily deteriorate from the systematic depression and anxiety that it appears as she is near insanity. Due to her persistent condition, her husband moved her to a distant house in hopes that it would heal what he claims is just temporary nervous depression. The author appears to draw a lot of symbolism from her own personal experiences with her surroundings much like the woman described in the story. For example, the yellow wallpaper in her new room is representative of her mental illness and how it is subtle and underlying but nevertheless difficult for her to handle.
Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.
Eventually the narrator becomes a "creeping woman. " The first indication is when she says, rather startlingly, "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight." Later, the narrator and the creeping woman work together to pull off the wallpaper. The narrator writes (or perhaps says -- there's some debate about this), "[T]here are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast."
Symbolism in “The Yellow Wallpaper” Nelson Mandela once said, “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.” In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a mentally unwell woman, the narrator, documents her experience of declining mental health and falls into psychosis while becoming obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. One of the themes to be found in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the lack of freedom that women had during the Victorian period. In the story, several examples of symbolism such as the wallpaper, the journal, and the wife crawling over her husband, help to support this.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.
In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the setting symbolizes much more than what appears to the reader in plain view. The story starts off with what seems to be a normal woman writing journal entries as she recovers from her post-mortem depression. As the story goes on, the reader soon realizes that the narrator is not as normal as once thought. She soon turns into a maniac with obsessive thoughts on the brink of insanity. As the narrator became manic, the setting becomes with manic along with her.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.
The room that John chooses for the two of them is a former nursery. All the windows in this room were barred, and the walls were covered in a yellow wallpaper, which the main character describes as “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 490). The main character protests this choice of rooms and asks her husband to move, but he refuses. This room essentially becomes a prison for the main character. Later on in the story she imagines that the pattern on the wallpaper is bars, like the ones on the windows, and that there are women
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a young woman who is battling severe depression. The protagonist is essentially locked away for the summer as a cure for her psychological disorder(s) (Craig 36). Being locked in the house with the yellow wallpaper worsens her mental state and eventually drives her to insanity. Throughout the course of the story, the protagonist’s mental state noticeably declines; she claims there are people in the wallpaper and believes it is haunting her. Several Gothic themes are scattered throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”; however, the protagonist’s isolation, the presence of insanity, and the occurring idea of supernatural elements are most prominent and can be used to justify “The Yellow
