Wallpaper Symbolizing Jane’s Insanity In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, the wallpaper causes and symbolizes Jane’s imprisonment which eventually causes her decent into insanity. Gilman shows this through the patterns and colors in the wallpaper itself, through the woman that she believes is stuck in the wallpaper, and when then wallpaper is finally taken down. As Jane continues to study the wallpaper, the different aspects that she discovers contribute to her eventual madness. The physical appearance of the wallpaper is directly symbolic of Jane’s situation. The yellowish color is affiliated with the weakness, and the powerlessness that she is feeling.
The wallpaper like John is a confine in which neither woman can escape from. The many heads in the wallpaper are the activities that the narrator wants to do such as writing, seeing her Cousin Henry and Julia, and sleeping downstairs. “I don’t like to look out the window even- there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast”(434). The women creeping outside are women like the narrator who are oppressed and have to do things in secret just like the narrator secretly tried to
The women are casualties of a domestic prison, a prison for the mind, created by society and their husbands, who are victims themselves in their own way, of a Gilded Age mindset. The women have no voice and no authority. Their intellect and creativity is considered a frivolous obstacle and a distraction from their jobs as homemakers. There is irony in the endings of these stories in that the victims, the women, adjust to their lot and turn the tables on their oppressors. In Trifles, the women come to a realization that they must bond together against their clueless husbands to see justice done.
She wants to become her own person and begins to defy society. In the end the author portrays that men are pigs by saying they leave a mess and the job of a woman is to clean it up. This is the start of Cisneros showing defiance in “House on Mango Street”. In the chapter “My Name” the author shows how a woman defies her family and cultures by wishing to change her name. Often a person’s name has a history behind it.
“I never saw a worse paper in my life.” As the narrative develops, her later feelings start to contradict her initial emotions and her behaviour becomes more irrational. “...It is like the colour of the paper! A yellow smell.” The suggestion of the wallpaper having a smell indicates a lingering odour which is perhaps metaphoric of the woman having the wallpaper consistently on her mind. She has become so entirely absorbed by the wallpaper that she is now letting it dictate her senses. As the story develops the woman’s descent into madness can start to be seen more clearly as she reveals her obsessive and protective nature over the wallpaper.
The wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls is used to symbolize the sphere because she is unable to break free from the room, like the narrator who is imprisoned and unable to escape without being strangled by the bars of social expectation. The wallpaper is the thing that the narrator exercises her imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and started actively studying and decoding its meaning. She unties its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. As her insanity gradually deepens, she is preoccupied with one woman behind the wallpaper and identifies completely with this woman, believing that she is also trapped within the bar-like pattern of the wallpaper.
This is displaying the beginning of her negative thoughts which is the contribution to her spiralling into insanity since her disease confuses her mind and contradicts her logic, the paper parallels her mental state at this point. The isolation of Jane causes her to attempt to fulfill her social desire by desperately attempting to unravel the mystery that she imagines in the wallpaper. From this attempt she becomes
Your Name Liberation: Winning or Losing! Can a woman overcome her oppression in a patriarchal society? Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening which were written in the 19th century, reveals woman’s position in the patriarchal society. The Yellow Wallpaper depicts how the woman is suppressed in Victorian Era, how this imprisonment paves the way for her disturbed mentality and her struggle to overcome it, whereas, The Awakening depicts the protagonist’s awakening of her imprisonment in the institution of marriage in the same era and her struggle to be free ignoring all her bonds with the family and the society. These two works of literature proves that how male dominance
Response to The Yellow Wallpaper Imagine yourself being locked in a room alone, scared, and mistreated. Imagine that room not being a part of your own home. Imagine having all of your friends and family members plotting against you. These are the emotions the narrator felt in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s literary masterpiece, The Yellow Wallpaper. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about a woman who is suffering from what is modernly known as post partrum depression.
Despite the void of sensationalistic media coverage reporting domestic violence in this country, it is a present and growing problem. The prevalence of physical and sexual abuse females endure, it is evident that many women in correctional facilities are there because of an attempt to end their histories of violation and repression. While crimes against their abusers accounts for a major reason many women are in prison, the ongoing war on drugs policy is one of the central contributing factor to the mass incarceration of women in America today. Too, add to this I feel the most devastating effect is the subsequent denial of federal benefits that people convicted of felony charges are subjected to once release from prison. Because