Symbolism In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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The many symbols that are present in the “Yellow Wallpaper” impact the theme of the story in many ways. The story is full of these symbols which present a great deal of information and thought-provoking questions. When reading through “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the average reader can pick up on the basic idea of the story. However, after deeply analyzing the story and all of its characters and symbols, a much deeper meaning is revealed. The relevance of symbolism in a good story is crucial to building this deeper meaning. The narrator in this story is put into a home for the summer. She calls this place “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house…”(Gilman 1). When they first arrive, the narrator …show more content…

He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies” (Gilman 5). This is one of the first hint that the narrator gives us about her condition and how it affects her. John, who is her husband, says that she has an illness that makes her nervous and very imaginative. This pretty much sums up any previous questions about her and why she was going to this “colonial mansion” (Gilman 1). After reading the story, the first part of the story can be cleared up fairly easily. The narrator is a woman who is diagnosed with a nervous problem. She imagines things that are not there and is always making up stories, or so it seems. “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could findin a toy-store” (Gilman 6). This quote provides some backstory to the origin of the narrator’s illness. She was born with this illness and it is something that has always affected her. Throughout the story, John treats the narrator as a child so much that she actually begins to revert back to this state. Part of her illness can be figured out by looking towards her husband, he is always treating …show more content…

This in it of itself is not that bad of an illness, It could be treated fairly easily using today’s technology and medicine. Back in the 1900s, there was not much known about how to fix this problem except for isolation. More often than not, the patient would become worse than before as in the case of the narrator. The various symbols in the story point to this conclusion rather than the one most people see when they read the story. By reading the story and not diving too deep into it, most people would think that she was always as crazy as she ended. However, this is not the case for the narrator, being confined to a small space for weeks made her problem worse. Being trapped in the room without anything to do made her feel as though the only thing she could do was look at the wallpaper. Once she started this, her mind started to come up with ideas and stories about the wallpaper. In conclusion, the woman that was trapped inside the wallpaper was actually the narrator herself. She was looking into the wallpaper and only finding a different version of

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