Freedom In The Yellow Wallpaper

Women’s Freedom Through the Discourse

In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she writes about a woman who suffers from temporary nervous depression as diagnosed by her overbearing husband, who is a doctor. The husband, John, is condescending towards his wife when she questions his diagnosis. Therefore, to get away from the confinement of not being able to speak for herself, the woman secretly writes in her journal as a sense of relief. The woman becomes fascinated and engrossed with the yellow wallpaper that hangs in her bedroom. She comes to the realization that a woman is trapped inside the wallpaper so she must tear it down to set the woman free. The act of tearing down the wallpaper alludes to the fact that the narrator feels she

The narrator confides in “dead language” (Treichler) as a source to freely express herself from the captivity placed upon her from her husband in an attempt to cure her condition of temporary nervous depression. The dead language represents writing in the journal for the narrator of the story. It is considered dead as she must be secretive about it for the fear of her husband John finding her writing as “he hates to have [her] write a single word” (Gilman). The woman is forbidden to work as a result of her husband’s treatment for her condition. He does not want her practicing discourse as he believes she is sick and her treatment is to be alienated from work, life, and writing to cure her condition. With John being a “physician of high standing” (Gilman), his role in the diagnosis of the narrator supports the claim of stereotypical woman of the household being a “domestic slave” (Treichler) to the head household, who is stereotypically considered a man. John, being a man, uses his medical diagnosis to exert control over his wife by telling her how she is to perceive, process, and act in her life. The narrator, who is a woman, at first is compliant with his orders. However, by her continuous action of secretly writing in her journal, she defies John’s course of treatment. She must be sly about her writing for “John will not allow her to

The wallpaper is an “alternate reality, […] a prison inhabited by its former inmates, whose struggles have nearly destroyed it.” (Treichler). The inmates are figures of women, who have also suffered from the control of men. The women in the wallpaper are a direct representation of the narrator herself and also her unconsciousness trying to free herself from the seclusion her husband put her in. The wallpaper is horrid as are the struggles of the women who are prisoners of it. The narrator is at first repelled by the wallpaper as she grows “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” (Gilman). Her spitefulness of the wallpaper shows her being reluctant to accept the dark reality of her husband dominance of her. However, despite the narrator’s malice towards the wallpaper “she not only grows to like it, but goes so far as to become, in her mind, literally one with it” (Suess). The narrator then creates a new “self-identity and sense of communality though her connection with and ultimately her transformation into the women/woman in the wallpaper” (Suess). As like the women in the wallpaper who are prisoners, the narrator realizes she is also a prisoner of the wallpaper. The wallpaper therefore symbolizes the narrator. However, narrator sees the pattern “strangles {the women] off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white”