Yellow Wallpaper Symbolism

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Pipkin 1 Trey Pipkin
Mrs. Davis
EN1123
21 February 2017
Symbolism in “The Yellow Wall-paper” In the nineteenth century, women were repressed and controlled by their husbands and other male influences. They weren't allowed to socialize and or work like the men did. Husbands wanted them to stay at home and do womanly duties, often leading to depression. In “The Yellow Wall-paper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist is oppressed and represents the effects of oppression in the women society and feels that woman should be able to do what men did. This is created by the symbols of the house, the window, the narrator’s journal, and the yellow wallpaper which help her with her oppression and self expression. The first symbol is …show more content…

The wallpaper has an intricate pattern that the narrator thinks that she must interpret it. It also is unpleasant and has an ostensibly formless pattern, which in return also facilitates the narrator as she attempts to figure out how it is organized. Jane says it's “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns [that] commit every artistic sin” and that the “color is repellant, almost revolting” (649). The narrator comes up with every possible problem with the wallpaper that she has with it. It's only because she is imprisoned in the room that she makes up all of this. “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broke neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (649). This is where she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, but only in visible light. (650) She realizes, only because she spends hours a day looking at it, that it's not only a ghostly pattern but it is a desperate woman trying to escape the ripped, soiled, and unclean yellow wallpaper. But in reality the woman in the wallpaper is actually the narrator. Beginning to realize that woman in the wallpaper is herself, the narrator begins ripping and tearing apart the wallpaper trying to release herself from it. Tearing the wallpaper down is the finally transformation into madness for the narrator. She is totally insane now. This also

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