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Symbolism employed in the short story the yellow wallpaper
Feminist approach to the yellow wallpaper
The feminism of the yellow wallpaper
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For centuries women in literature have been depicted as weak, subservient, and unthinking characters. Before the 19th century, they usually were not given interesting personalities and were always the proper, perfect and supportive character to the main manly characters. However, one person, in order to defy and mock the norm of woman characterization and the demeaning mindsets about women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." This story, through well crafted symbolisms, brought to surface the troubles that real women face. Her character deals with the feeling of being trapped by the expectations of her husband, with the need to do something creative or constructive, and to have a mind and will of her own. These feelings are represented through various symbols in the story which include the wallpaper, the woman in the wallpaper, the mental sickness that progressed throughout the story, male presence/influence, moonlight/daylight, and the crazy pattern on the wallpaper. The wallpaper in Gilman's story represents the unnamed narrator's repressed and trapped self. The side that is not liberated by insanity. It represents everything that she detests about her life; not being allowed to write, having to be a mother, and needing to be someone who John expects her to be. In this way, her immediate hatred of the wallpaper is fitting. The old saying that says a person always hates others for the things they hate about themselves applies to her hatred of the wallpaper. The yellowness of the wallpaper reminds her of her sickness because yellow is the color of jaundice and generally symbolizes inferiority, strangeness, cowardice, ugliness, and backwardness. Therefore, because she sees these things in herself, she hates t... ... middle of paper ... ...but is not able to. The narrator's world is a world where men control everything she does. She cannot go as she pleases or be the creative person she is and wants to be, so she does it in secret and eventually drives herself insane. All of the symbolisms in her story combine together to enforce the idea of a duality of the narrator's life. She is forced to be two people because of the pressures of society. They emphasize the idea and major point of Gilman's story that women need to be able to be themselves and express themselves and have rights and their own lives. I would categorize this story as an existential in nature because it was up to the narrator to decide to do the things she did. She could have forced herself to stop looking at the wallpaper and ignored her fantasies but she wanted to be her own person and therefore decided to let herself go insane.
Gilman’s work draws forth, through experience some of the struggles women faced daily and demonstrates the battle for women’s free will. To entirely understand Gilman’s work one needs to know what feminism truly is, that it is about “...not only exposing but, more importantly, with electrifying myriad forms of women's oppression.” (Jean) Feminism has no secret agenda, it is meant to educate people on the struggles that many women face day-to-day at the hands of men. Gilman’s story demonstrates this element by having her main character subject to her husband's wishes no matter what. As the story progresses the reader sees the woman slowly lose her sanity but continuously obey her husband's orders to stay at the house. One gets a look into the troubled mind of a controlled woman; the desire to do something but a voice that tells them no, until they can no longer take it and causes them to go crazy. Their thirst for freedom caused them to do whatever they can to gain some form of control.
Upon first reading Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", it appears to be consecutive journal entries written by a flighty woman-plagued with bouts of depression-about her stay at a vacation home. Though upon closer inspection, the double entendre of this cleverly written story reveals itself.
Symbolism plays a major role in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Several symbols are used to show the oppression of women by men as well as the struggle against that male dominated society. While there are a plethera of symbols that could be cited from the text to support this, there are a few especially important symbols throughout the story that lend support to the woman's suffrage theme. The wallpaper itself is symbolic of the mental barrier that men attempted to place on women during the 1800s. The color yellow is often associated with illness or weakness, and the writer's mysterious sickness is a symbol of man's oppression of the female sex.
After analyzing Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper", from a feminist perspective it is undoubtedly shown to challenge patriarchal ideals through the stories heavy amounts of symbolism. The story revolves around the thoughts of a woman suffering from hysteria who ultimately loses her sanity due to her interactions with the isolated environment and husband, John. The story does a clear job at showing the oppressions of women in the late nineteenth century through the narrator's conversations with John, the ideas she has written down and in her head, the room in which she is caged in and finally the reflection of the Gilman's life in this story.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses symbolism to add to the mood of her short story. While being treated for depression by rest cure, the narrator is stuck in a room covered in horrible yellow wallpaper that she claims is revolting, “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” (Gilman 298). Her view on this wallpaper symbolizes that she is not an optimistic thinker and also immediately shows the reader that she is not emotionally stable, as she is obsessing over a simple color. This also begins to set an ominous and eerie mood to the short story. Secondly, as the story progresses she begins to see things in the
Throughout most of history women have been considered to be submissive and weaker than men. Wifehood and motherhood has been viewed amongst women's most meaningful calling to some people. In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" author Charlotte Perkins Gilman interprets her own struggle to overcome subordination and dependency to her husband who is also a physician. Through her emotional instability and her trapped mind set, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" suggests that to find freedom within oneself, like many trapped women in the world, one must liberate the mind and spirit before one can truly be free. The social isolation between Gilman and others in this short story is seen in her deserted upstairs bedroom. Between the atrocious yellow wallpaper and her inability to better her emotinal status, Gilman represented issues that many
The author describes the wallpaper as a disturbing and unsettling sight. It often makes the narrator uncomfortable, while using personification the yellow wall is brought to life and the narrator explains it as if the wallpaper were a person in the room along with her. The narrator describes the wallpaper as “poor thing” and that there is a woman inside of the wall that “shakes the pattern”(Gilman 655). As the story develops the real meaning of the woman beyond the wallpaper becomes more clear. The wallpaper is illustrated as if it were none other but the narrator herself. The poor wallpaper and the woman the shakes the pattern attempting to set herself free. Almost as if the wallpaper were her ‘poor’ illness and she is shaking the expectations set upon her by John, attempting to be free. She also begins to talk about how when the woman gets out of the wallpaper when no one is around, she creeps throughout the room and the outside, not wanting to be found or seen. The narrator’s true self creeping around when John isn’t around, attempting not to be seen or found, afraid of the possibility of getting sent away. Finally as the story progresses the true meaning of the wall paper and the woman beyond it begin to become even more visible. She speaks about the wallpaper saying “it slaps you in the face, knocks you
...society is limited. Gilman seems to express that the female condition can be fragile. This story is only about the madness of one woman, yet it seems to make a general statement about the condition of all females. The mental illness eventually consumes the narrator as her creativity gets taken away. There are even some clues as to the narrator foreshadowing her own illness. The wallpaper symbolizes this in many ways. One of the way it does this is through the feeling of the narrator feeling “trapped.” After feeling trapped for so long she starts to identify herself with the figure behind the wallpaper. This is a good symbol to present women’s confinement and emotional condition of the time era that Gilman lived in. The story could be Gilman’s way of expressing herself because her own creativity was limited to such a point where she could not find a creative outlet.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions which society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria. The narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression." In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
Charlotte Gilman like her character, Jane, had postpartum depression after having her first child. In her short story it reflects off of how her real experience with Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and the resting cure effects Jane’s husband’s beliefs. By using the first person point-of-view we can see Jane’s steady decline into insanity after being cut-off from the outside world and how the yellow wallpaper becomes her fixation. Jane’s husband John is a physician in the early 20th century who avidly believes in the resting cure is the one who makes her believe that this treatment will work, since she is a woman her requests for going to see family or to leave the room are quickly set aside and ignored.
... "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not simply a story of a woman whose imagination drives her insane, it is a symbolic story of the woman writer who wishes to free herself from the conventions of the male dominated literary world. Gilman's proposes that women can achieve such status that they deserve, but that they must first acknowledge and see truthfully the "madness" surroundings, the tenets created by men, and become driven by the "madness" to overcome it. It is not impossible, but an uphill battle won by many others. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is proof of this: her work is wholly a part of the literary canon, among the best of her male peers.
...chniques that Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses in "The Yellow Wallpaper" to suggest that a type of loneliness (in women) caused by imprisoning oppression can lead to the deadliest form of insanity. By using setting, Gilman shows how the barred windows intensifies the young woman's imprisoning oppression, the isolated summer home represents the loneliness the young woman feels, and her hallucinations of the wallpaper pattern indicates her transition to insanity. Wallpaper symbolism is used throughout the story the pattern representing the strangling nature of the imprisoning oppression, the fading yellow color showing the fading away of the young woman, and the hovering smell representing the deadly insanity to which she succumbs. Like the darkness that quickly consumes, the imprisoning loneliness of oppression swallows its victim down into the abyss of insanity.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman explores the oppression of women in the nineteenth century and the constant limitation of their freedom, which many times led to their confinement. The short story illustrates male superiority and the restriction of a woman’s choice regarding her own life. The author’s diction created a horrific and creepy tone to illustrate the supernatural elements that serve as metaphors to disguise the true meaning of the story. Through the use of imagery, the reader can see that the narrator is living within a social class, so even though the author is trying to create a universal voice for all women that have been similar situations, it is not possible. This is not possible because there are many
Societal control of the accepted terms by which a woman can operate and live in lends itself to the ultimate subjugation of women, especially in regards to her self-expression and dissent. Gilman does an extraordinary job of effectively communicating and transforming this apparent truth into an eerie tale of one woman’s gradual spiral towards the depths of madness. This descent, however, is marked with the undertones of opportunity. On one hand, the narrator has lost all hope. On the other, she has found freedom in losing all hope. This subversion of the patriarchal paradigm is tactfully juxtaposed against a backdrop of the trappings of insanity.
The result from her moving away from the community’s views on women, labeled her as a mental patient, who supposedly hallucinates frequently. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story made to portray women’s oppression during the late 1800s or early 1900s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses metaphors and other techniques to enhance the expression of women’s hardships. Throughout the short story, Gilman delivers occurrences of a neutral standpoint of suppression, a realization, the understanding, and then the acceptance of the main issue. Through the selection of characters, setting, and point of view, “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses the women’s