Literary Criticism In The Yellow Wallpaper

No one literary theory is specific enough to explain a literary body of work, various approaches are needed to truly analyze and evaluate the structured themes in literature. The Feminist Approach is the most common literary device used in theorizing Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; the story is a tale of a Victorian Age woman controlled by a patriarchal society, which is not in question. The second most common approach is the Psychoanalyze criticism, our protagonist Jane is most likely suffering from post-partum depression as theorized by Beate Schöpp-Schilling. The least represented theory is the Structuralism approach. This paper will focus on the third approach and the linear distinction of how closely structuralism correlates to the first two theories.
Before jumping into the three different types of literary criticisms a brief background of Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman and a synopsis is in order. Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a semi-autobiographical piece of literature in 1892. Gilman utilized her own
The relationship starts out in typical fashion a loving one and descends into a broken shell of marital bliss. She is emotional and he is logical, she is housebound where he is always traveling. The day and night binary is about how the protagonist identifies with the woman behind the wallpaper. As she ponders the woman in the wallpaper she remarks how similar their patterns are in sleep, ‘I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal during the daytime.’ Once she associates her identity with the woman in the wallpaper, she notes ‘I think that woman gets out in the daytime” (Gilman p 487) Here the word pattern is the binary that happens, the pattern for the still sane Jane are the patterns of her mind that continually shift with random thoughts as do the patterns in the