Caged In
Caged In: Breaking Through the Walls of Oppression Held back, caged, strangled, deprived, and hurt. These words begin to describe the feelings that are stressed in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". Women have made incredible progress since 1892 when Gilman's short story was written. Charlotte Perkins Gilman knew that women were desperate for gender equality. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator tries desperately to free an imaginary, imprisoned woman from that "repellant, almost revolting" wallpaper (Gilman 227). In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman uses personification to give the wallpaper a life of it's own and to be an overbearing symbol of female oppression. Furthermore, to understand Gilman's goals, we must first try to understand her as a person. This story is not just something Gilman conjured up with a creative mind. This story is a semi-autobiographical account of what she went through as a bed-ridden wife and mother suffering from depression. At one point in the story Gilman referred to her own neurologist: "John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall"(Gilman 229
The narrator's rights to be free and enjoy her creativity were stripped away from her, while women's rights including the vote and the ability to be economically independent have been taken away. The two trapped women helped each other out of their separate prisons. She consistently received child-like treatment from her husband John: "There comes John, and I must put this away---he hates to have me write a word"(227). "The Yellow Wallpaper" used symbols and characters to address issues of the times that were serious and not necessarily acceptable to write about. More specifically, Gilman made a direct connection between her characters trying to escape their own prisons to women in society trying to break the chains of oppression. If you compare this piece of the plot to the central theme of female oppression, they can be easily related. This was Gilman's answer to how women must free themselves. The woman in the wallpaper is the narrator's only true focus in her life. Eventually, they became one and were more powerful. Moreover, Gilman's feminist beliefs had always bled through her writing, and "The Yellow Wallpaper" would hold true to this form. Finally, It is clear that Gilman used "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a symbol for the fight for women's rights. As the narrator and the wallpaper became more dependent upon each other, they seemed to become one for both tried to escape their different, yet equally awful prisons. Throughout the novel, Gilman revealed the transformation of the once-hated wallpaper into a passionate obsession.
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Acceptance Essays
