S Struggle And Ambition In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Woman 's Struggle and Ambition In the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there is a lot of symbolism in the story. I chose to find the meaning behind the color yellow, the wallpaper, and creeping. "The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight (239)."A dull yellow represents caution, sickness, and jealously. "The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing (244)." The yellow represents her postpartum depression. She had gotten the depression after she had the baby and was locked in a room to treat her depression because that 's what they thought was best at that time. The yellow also represents jealously

I think that she was jealous of men because they had all the rights and were seen as being in charge of the women. "The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color yellow! A yellow smell (246)." The yellow is bringing out her depression. She starts to recognize the smell which I think represents that she is starting to realize something is not right with her. She probably doesn 't know she has depression but she knows that she is sick even though nobody wants to tell her that she is sick. "Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John 's, and she wished we would be more careful (245)." I feel as if the yellow getting on all of the clothes is a sign of her depression. When it gets of Johns clothes I feel as if he is maybe feeling depressed also because she is not getting better. Or maybe it 's a sign he is depressed because she had left him and the baby to

But in the places where it isn 't faded and where the sun is just so-I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conscious front design (241)." She is realizing her depression is sometimes worse at times than it is at other times. She wants to break free from the weight she has of having all the pressures and expectations that men put on women. "And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through the pattern—it strangles so (246)." The pattern represents how she is stuck in being a wife and a stay at home mother. She is expected to be the one who cooks and cleans and takes care of her child. She is not allowed to have a job outside of the home because back then that was looked upon as being bad. She does not like this and that 's why she feels stuck with no way to get out. "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper. And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it today (247)." I feel as this represents that she will not let a man be in charge of her any longer. She will be her own person and have rights. She wanted to fight for this so that her daughter would not have to be a slave to her husband. "Jennie looked at