Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper is short story that was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1891. Gilman says she wrote because she had an experience very similar to the woman in the story. She was very depressed and was made to do things much like the woman is made to in the story. The story begins with a woman who is mildly depressed. To cure her, her husband and physician, John, moves the family to a large estate in the country. The rest cure was very popular at that time and it consisted of just that, hours upon hours of rest. When they get to the estate, the woman is given the largest room in the house, an airy room upstairs that she say use to be a nursery but was converted to a gymnasium. The room is very strange. It has a huge wooden bed that is nailed to the floor and it had bars on the window. However, the strangest aspect of all is the wallpaper. It is a stale, putrid yellow with a perplexing design that is impossible to follow to an end. The woman also tells us that parts are ripped off and there is a "smooch" low on the wall all around the room. So she is made to stay in the room with the paper and at first she hates it. Then she becomes more and more obsessed b
At the beginning of the she was just mildly depressed, probably resulting from her recent pregnancy (which we now know as post-natal depression. It is obvious that the woman in the believes that she is completely helpless and totally dependant on John. Also most medicinal practices at the time were primitive at the most. This goes along with the odd things in the room like the bed nailed down to keep her from moving and the windows barred to keep her from leaving. There are probably many ways to interpret this story, but I think the best way is to look at society in the era. She then begins talking about a dim figure in the shape of a woman is looks as though she is trapped behind the paper and is trying to get out. She talks about the design which impossible to follow and she says just when you think you are getting somewhere the design "somersaults back" and "commits suicide. All of these things just show that she is not alone, that there are many others in her same position and there were many others before her. So of course what happens is the woman goes mad and believes that the wallpaper is actually somewhat alive. You can see this twice in the first page of the story, she says, "what is one to do," which tells us that she will not act on what she actually wants. In concordance with this fact, I believe that Gilman purposely did not give the woman in the story a name. In that time, women were a much lower class than men and they had next to no rights. She says that the woman is trapped behind the paper and often she shakes and rattles it to get out. The woman in the paper represents all women, and the paper represents the oppressive society that they all were facing at that time.
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