A repressed women with a desire to be free and happy. The relation between when the woman in the wallpaper and the narrator when the woman is behind bars symbolizes the narrator and how she is trapped in this tiny room with a husband who controls her every word and actions. He undermines her in almost every way. For example the narrator says on page 590 “I am afraid, but i don't care- there is something strange about that house-I can feel it, I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what i felt was a drought, and shut the window.” This shows how john undermines her fears as just a simple shiver from the window being open when she is trying to explain how she doesn't like the place because shes
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.
This aids in leading to her mental condition deteriorating even further due to the fact that she must simply put up with her prison. As the story progressives and the narrator spends more of her time in the room the more she becomes accustomed to her prison. Her obsession with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her constantly grows to an unhealthy addiction. “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.
Even worse, their wedding song was playing. While he appears much more stable after his release from the institution, the song is still a spark that can bring on uncontrollable rage. During Pat’s struggle, a woman named Tiffany Maxwell, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is experiencing a similar difficulty with mental illness. After the death of her husband, she slept with all eleven people in her office, which resulted in her termination. Suffering depression, Tiffany has trouble seeing how her life could improve.
– I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that sill and conspicuous front design” (749). Eventually this leads to the narrator beginning to obsess with the wallpaper. She states, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper” (750). The narrator begins to have thoughts of homicide because of the wallpaper and its smell.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a piece named “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the narrator of the story is vividly entangled in her imagination causing her artistic impulses to consume her emotions. She is a “closet psychotic” as she does not disclose this infatuation of the yellow wallpaper to anyone around her. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes a complex story where the narrator is trapped in her secret obsession of unraveling what’s inside this “yellow wallpaper”, which then drives her imaginative creativity, into insanity. The narrator begins by informing the reader how she and her family have recently started to stay in a new house for a little while so she may receive complete rest. This respite was prescribed to her by her husband, a physician.
It represents imprisonment and this is made clear when the she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”. (245) The imprisonment is created from the yellow wallpaper because the Jane repeatedly asks to remove it but isn’t allowed and she is confined to the room she despises due to the stubbornness seen from her husband. You can see Jane slowly descend into her madness with her hallucinations- “The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." (248) “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!
Though showing to much emotion is almost always looked down upon not being able to express any emotion can have serous negative effects on ones wellbeing. Like in the story The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is forced to stay at her husbands summer home and spend time alone in attempt help cure her form her state of depression. While there she is not aloud to write or do any actives this slowly starts to have a negative effect on her mental health. She becomes obsessed with the idea that someone is behind the yellow wallpaper that is in her jail she calls her room. This continues after multiple attempts to tell her husband that she is uncomfortable with the yellow wallpaper.
John refuses to listen to her feelings on the issues, instead of talking to find the problem. He isolates her and locks her away to think about her own thoughts. The wallpaper in her room becomes a symbol for her and she begins to see figures behind the pattern and tries to escape within herself. She compares her husband to the patterns and wishes "that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one." She starts to see women behind the pattern itself and starts to see that "in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard."
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the type of short story that intrigues the reader and isn’t exactly what it seems like at first glance. It is full of hidden meanings and leaves the road open to many different interpretations. But one thing every reader will probably agree on is that the mental health of the narrator of the story seems to be deteriorating towards the end of the short story. The author uses this to show exactly how she is being restricted by her husband and many other men in her life. Times were different back then, and unfortunately women weren’t treated as fairly as men were.