She isn’t aloud to do any kind of work and is given strict instructions to get air and relax her self. She spends most of her time in a room that she suspects to be an old play room for the past owner’s children. The room is covered with yellow wallpaper which taunts her with images and patterns that she sees. She is mesmerized by the images and they consume her. She loses her touch with reality and becomes one of the creeping women she sees.
By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is the first stage in a feminist uprising. From the beginning of the story, the narrator’s creativity is set in conflict with John’s rationality. As a writer, the narrator thrives in her use of her imagination, and her creativity is an inherent part of her nature. John does not recognize his wife’s fundamental creativity and believes that he can force out her imaginative fancies and replace them with his own solid
Jane grows jealous, as she believes Jennie is secretly trying to do the same. On the last day of their stay, the Narrator decides that she has the perfect opportunity to free the woman in the wallpaper. After the room is emptied, she locks herself inside of it and demands to be left alone. Tearing free the wallpaper, she enters full psychosis, and takes on the persona of the woman in the wallpaper. When her husband returns that evening, he finds her creeping madly across against the wall.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of the nursery. She eventually begins to see what she describes as a female figure trapped behind the bar-like pattern and comes to believe that she and the figure are suffering from the oppression of being imprisoned. As her preoccupation of the wallpaper pattern progresses, she no longer has the desire to become who her family wishes her to be and instead thinks only of how she can go about releasing the woman from the wallpaper. She grows more obsessive and insane with the passing of each day. In the end of the story, the narrator has lost all sense of reality, and John discovers her crawling around on the floor of the nursery, following the pattern of the wallpaper.
She said, “...and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion,” as if the wallpaper was made with symmetry in mind. After staring at the wallpaper for hours, she starts to notice a sub-pattern that is visible in a certain light. As she says, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast …they get through, and then the pattern strangles them off.” What she sees in this sub-pattern is a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. She sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. The wallpaper represents the structure of family, medicine, and tradition in which she finds herself trapped.
Analytical paper # 2 Due: October 24, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a young woman whose creative appeal and self-expression are suppressed by her society and her marriage. The short story is told by the narrator through her diary, which she describes as an exemption of her thoughts. The narrator is apparently artistic and creative as can be seen through her animated descriptions of the house her husband John has rented. The narrator includes representations of the yellow wallpaper in the upstairs nursery where she and her husband sleep at night. The wallpaper is used characterically to reflect the marriage the narrator finds herself ambushed inside.
ENG110 As it would appear The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a narrative describing the trials a woman faces when battling PPD (postpartum depression). However, under further investigation it is clear that the meaning Gilman imposes on her audience is the concept of entrapment to amplify the absurdity of male dominance in the 17th C. Opposing characteristics of the female main character and her husband, in conjunction with imagery and the metaphor of “the woman in the wallpaper” collaboratively work to express the standards expected of a woman and the feeling of isolation evoked by powerlessness. The central character of The Yellow Wallpaper is our narrator who serves as both mother and wife. Her role in the story is contrasted by the leading male character her husband, John, a physician. However their union seems less like a marriage and more like the relationship one would see between parent and child.
Her current self, that is removed from her previous, more sane state, is becoming confortable in the room and feels she can do what she wants in it, however her recollection which still hangs with her drives her to feel the need to rip down the yellow wallpaper. This wallpaper which she feels symbolizes her prison when she was first shut off in the room, hypothetically imprisoning her former self. I really have discovered something at last.Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, Ihave finally found out.The front pattern DOES move--and no wonder! The
The husband tries to reach his wife but the door has been locked. After many moments of panic, John gets the door open and sees this constant action his wife keeps doing. Shocked, John faints and his wife comments about having to step over his body. One can argue that being confined for so long and limited to her usual rituals, the narrator has come across schizophrenia. After John is questioning her action the narrator states, “I’ve got out at last, said I, in spite of you and Jane.
Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure of family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped. Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman skillfully uses this nightmarish, hideous paper as a symbol of the domestic life that traps so many women. Almost every aspect of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is ironic in some way.