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
The narrator, which suffers of a nervous disorder, is trapped in a place that is supposed to be some kind of a haunted house or an old man asylum. Primarily, the setting is taken place at a lonely room surrounded by yellow wallpaper with a window covered with bars for security reasons. When at first the woman is put into that room it can be clearly foreshadowing by the readers that the room is for crazy people and they can get even crazier in that room. This is exactly what happens to the lady, she feels trapped in the room and starts to see figures of woman in the wallpaper. The story goes by and the setting does not change, that is why the woman goes crazier and starts crawling into the wallpaper trying to help get the woman out.
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 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.
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.
(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
She wonders things that have happened that she herself caused. Like when she does not grasp right away that the yellow stain and the “smootch” are connected. Nor does she connect that the problem with the lady in the wallpaper is her own problem. Matter of fact she even scoffs at the ladies attempts to escape and is going to “tie her
Her mind becomes an abyss of nothingness as she emulates the object she once loathed. Charlotte Perkins’ the yellow wallpaper encounters numerous levels to which it can be read. The most simple being a woman slowly being driven mas. Also showing the social structure of a family and how the male is the dominant being and what he says is expected to be obeyed. The yellow wallpaper can also be read through the eyes of phycology and the making of a mental patient, how a woman locked up and restricted from using her mind is slowly suffocated by her madness.
Discuss madness in relation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. The ‘revolting’(pg 3) paper is the eponymous metaphor of the novella. The wallpaper has layers, hidden depths and intricacies which can only be seen by close examination and only understood by the narrator by her when her obsessive interrogation of it reaches its disturbing climax. This wallpaper is an allegory which represents the complications of a woman’s position in conventional marriage behind the façade, or outer ‘pattern’(pg 3) of the sanction. Throughout the text, Gilman attempts to uncover the often disturbing truths that lurk beneath the surface of something seemingly innocent with reference to her own socio-economic philosophy; that is the economics of marriage and the nature of the mentally destructive sub-ordination of women within it.
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.