Summary and Critique of short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkin Gilman
The central focus of this intriguing story is the development of an individual consciousness towards an apparent form of insanity and eventually into a state of total psychosis. The story begins as we encounter the thoughts and feelings of the main character; a woman who is seemingly ill and possibly suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband rents a large rambling country house and insists that she do nothing but rest. She is obviously suffering from a form of depression but her husband does not take this seriously and does not investigate or seemed cornered with the root causes of her condition. She is treated in a condescending but kindly way by the husband. However, the important aspect of their relationship is that the husband sees her not as an individual in her own right but more as a child who is incapable of looking after herself. It becomes clear as the story develops that the women or narrator of the story is stripped of her sense of self. She seems to have no ability to fulfill her role as a women and mother and her child is kept from her. However, the central aspect of the story is the way that the woman sees images and animations in the wallpaper of the room in which she is confined. The wallpaper i
Another aspect that is important in the story is the lack of awareness that the woman in the narrative has of her real predicament. At the end of the story she loses her sense of reality completely in a climax which suggests the conventions of a horror story. Eventually the images in the wallpaper are transformed in the narrator's mind into images of trapped women in the wall or prison within the wallpaper. (Metaphor in "The Yellow Wallpaper")The above quotation serves to point out some of the cardinal elements of the story as social commentary. The narrator is virtually trapped in the room with the yellow wallpaper. As one study states, Gilman lived in a time when women were routinely oppressed by society and she represented this in her story, both literally in the husband's treatment of the narrator, and figuratively, in the pattern in the wallpaper being a prison for the woman (or women) behind it. The story is in fact about the way that the individual encounters and is affected by the prejudices and biases in society. "The woman who speaks to us only obscurely recognizes that conforming to the stereotype of ideal womanhood of the time is the very cause of her "nervous depression". She becomes the trapped and "creeping" woman in the yellow wallpaper. The husband represents the word of male patriarchal domination. The story has therefore been interpreted in many studies from the point of view of the way that the women are treated in modern patriarchal society. In the first instance we become aware of the fact that the narrator as a woman is treated in a way that reduces her individuality and autonomy and her husband is shown to be a domineering and pervasive influence in her life. This is also therefore a story that not only critiques societal norms and values but is also intended to make women more aware of the nature of the forces that create their suffering and loss of individuality on a personal level.
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