The trapped woman hints to a resemblance of the woman’s mind as she is not allowed to use it and therefore becomes trapped herself in an unimaginable world, seeking refuge in her diary entries. The uncanny can also be represented through the wallpaper as the terror she lives with every day of her life being stuck in a room surrounded by the grotesque pattern with nothing to do but stare at it all day and all night, conjuring stories in her
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.
The setting impacted the character in the story because the woman was in that lonely room the whole time and the woman just felt more insane. A very important quote said by Charlotte Perkins is “There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every
(755). This is when the readers find out that the woman in the wall was the narrator. These examples show that since the narrator was not able to stimulate her brain by talking to people, working, or doing everyday chores her mind focused on the wallpaper. It created an image of a woman in the wall, which ended up causing tremendous damage to the narrator. That is why the dangers of the "rest cure" is a theme of "The Yellow
As previously mentioned she uses the words ill formed and feeble to describe her unfinished writing’s fragility. In line 10, she continues by saying, “thy visage was so irksome in my sight,” to explain the shame and discomfort that she carries with her due to the fact that her “baby” was exposed to the public still so unpolished. She applies the words blemishes, flaw, and hobbling into her diction in order to express her piece as something that is not well put together, and no matter how much she attempts to polish it, she feels as if she has failed at improving it. Lastly, Bradstreet’s characterization of her work comes to life through the evident controlling metaphor of the poem, which is claiming that her writing is her “offspring”. Throughout the entire poem, the controlling metaphor becomes this idea that her writing is her child,
‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ Argues without Argument ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ is a complex short story told though the point of view of a sarcastic and insane protagonist, who has rapidly changing ideas about her surroundings, other characters and even her own psychological state. Because of this, readers may come to a variety of conclusions about major plot points and themes. Puzzled, readers will identify the piece as a horror story—a vivid portrayal of insanity with unsettling realism. This is indeed the conscious conclusion that Charlotte Perkins Gilman intends for her readers to form. However, the piece is so much more than a simple horror story; it is a deceptively hidden but powerful essay on female equality and marriage, two topics about which Gilman wrote frequently.
The wallpaper in the woman’s room represents imprisonment and this is strongly shown when she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman). The imprisonment image is created because she repeatedly asks to remove the wallpaper but isn’t allowed and she is evidently trapped in the room, just as the figure in the pattern seems to be trapped in the wall. Gilman also shows how obsessive she has become with the wallpaper and why she is so obsessed when she describes the wallpaper, “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be”. The woman in the pattern that she refers to is actually her.
The way John creates a sudden fear in his wife which provokes her to startle and hide her journal speaks volumes of his influence over her life. Gilman’s use of symbolism first begins to take flight when the woman in her story suddenly begins to notice the wallpaper. It becomes evident only through her use of symbolism that controlling men trap women from all of their potential. The wallpaper in her story symbolizes women who have long been repressed by such men, and by society. Gilman demonstrates this very notion in the slightest ways, such as when the woman first describes the wallpaper as if it had been used by a room of boys: “The paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it.
The spots of the wallpaper that have been torn off represent the women that have come before her that have had the same desires to escape from the sphere of domesticity in which women are bound. As the figure within the wallpaper begins to become apparent to the narrator, she cannot determine whether it is one woman or multiple women that are stuck behind the wallpaper. Describing the multiple heads she believes she is seeing, the narrator says, “They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white” (99). These heads were
Her use of words in ‘Elm’ is also interesting. “Faults” could be emotional and/or physical and this shows the psychological states explored throughout Sylvia Plath’s work. “Malignity” symbolises evil and the intensity of how disturbed her life was.Another poem by Plath that I found to be personal on an intense and disturbing way was ‘Mirror’. It is clear as Plath looks into the mirror that she is unhappy, watching her age. A mirror never lies, but Plath cannot find solace in what she sees.