Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The feminist masterpiece
Back to 1800s, in U.S and all over the world, women did not have equal rights and freedom as men. Their main roles are wives and moms, doing household and take care of family. In that scene, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” based on her own experience in 1892. Gilman suffered from postpartum depression after have her first daughter, and she was treated by her husband with “rest cure” method, but it did not work at all. Instead, this method made her illness became worse, and the result is she got obsesses to the wallpaper. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman shows to readers how bad the situations of women in 19th century. Through this story, author wants to talks about the subordination of women in

In this story, the protagonist’s husband, John, controls everything around her. He decides where she can live, what she can do, when she can go out…. John dismisses everything that his wife asks for. The narrator is forced to live in a house which she does not want to. She declares the house is "haunted…there is something queer about it" (765). She wants to move out to another space where she feel more comfortable, similar to her desire to have a new life, escape from her marriage. However, her husband does not accept her require, and neither the whole society do not think that’s what she can do. When she expresses her feeling about the house, he said that “what I felt was a draught” (766). She is imprisoned as her husband puts her on the top room, to avoid her of escaping. When the narrator wants to move to another room, says that the wallpaper in her bedroom disturbs her, he thinks that was not correct and refuse to replace the wallpaper. When she suggests to come and see her cousin Henry, her husband denies immediately. Besides, John does not believe that his wife is an independent person has creative and own thought. He thinks she is like a child, calling her “blessed little goose” and “little girl”.

In this story, the protagonist has to escape herself inside the wallpaper. Usually, wallpaper is the symbol of women, both are pretty and fixture inside rooms. Women are expected to tend to the housework and the family - and do not go out to work as free as husbands. The wallpaper here is the barriers to women to join the outside world. When the narrator looks out the window, she sees the beautiful world out side, but she can only watch them. This symbol window may be a view of possibilities. The world outside is everything that she could have, but she never has them. That’s why the narrator sinks into the wallpaper. Besides, she can see that the women in the wall paper is just like her. They both have a shape but so not have real lives, “sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over”, but “nobody could climb through the pattern” (773). When she sees “many women,” it means not only one woman like her, but all of them are not allowed to express themselves. They cannot climb through it, and they are struggle in feeling of imprisoned in their own lives and unable to escape. Sympathize with these women, the protagonist tries to tear out of the domesticated prison of the wallpaper, let all of women there free. To do that, she needs to avoid both her husband and her sister in law. That means not only her