The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Christina Serrano

EN 127

Paper 1

March 4, 2014

“The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Commentary on Women’s Roles in the Late Nineteenth Century

Women's roles within society have changed drastically throughout history. Today, women assume relative equality in society with men; women have the right to vote, own property, get divorced, and hold the same jobs, among other things. Prior to 1919, however, women were dominated by the largely misogynistic society that existed in the United States; women did not have the right to vote and were not regarded as equal to men in marriage or otherwise (“woman suffrage”). The late nineteenth century in the United States was also a time when society viewed individuals with mental illnesses as “a threat to public safety” (Holtzman). Therefore, “people with mental illness were cared for by family members, who quietly attended to their needs in rural areas” (Holtzman). These are the conditions the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” was living within.

Described as an “autobiographical account fictionalized in the first person,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles the narrator as she is brought to a country house and put on rest cure, instructed by her physician husband to live in a room with yellow wallpaper (“The Yellow Wallpaper”). Throughout her stay there, the narrator appears to develop a sort of hysteria and falls into a deeper depression than when she arrived.

Understanding this historical context, a major question that “The Yellow Wallpaper” raises is whether the narrator is actually sick or whether the sickness illustrated in the text is a metaphorical sickness that is to be understood as a commentary on women's oppression by the male-dominated society of the time. Due...

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...ds displays that the narrator did not have a problem with her husband, but her problem was with society; the narrator knew that her husband was only putting her on rest cure because it was the societal norm. It was all he knew. The relationship that the narrator developed with the wallpaper, or rather what she saw within the wallpaper, was demonstrative of the idea that she herself was trapped. But this wasn’t the only time the concept of entrapment was evidence in the story. Much of the language itself, even not when the narrator was speaking out loud, were words that generally are used to describe oppression, death, and entrapment. The aforementioned reasons provide evidence to support the argument that the narrator felt trapped by the chains society has placed on her, and that the telling of her sickness is a symbolic representation of her desire to rebel.