Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper
In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", by Charlotte Perkins Gilman it is interesting to see an otherwise simple plot become increasingly complex due to the metaphorical significance of the wallpaper. In my reading, I can come up with many applications of the narrator's "sickness" to matters of the world; such as femininity, depression, and the confines that other people put on us, or that we put on ourselves. After analyzing the story, it could easily be said that the author was trying to portray the struggle of domination between men and women. In a sense the narrator eventually escapes her husband's control but at the cost of her own sanity. I feel that Gilman's story can be taken in its most literal sense as the battle between male and female, but to dig deeper, why couldn't we say that the story shows a general struggle over the control of our own lives? The general population is brought up by some authority that tells us what is right and wrong, and as we grow older we sl
She sees the pattern on the wallpaper as bars behind which a woman is imprisoned: At night. The wallpaper comes to represent the narrator's desire to escape from her husband's oppressive behavior. As we move away from whomever or whatever has raised us, we begin to savor our sovereignty, but also realize that now we still have to answer to someone. We are never entirely free, that is until we are dead (or at least dead to this world). He says to her, "What is it little girl?" "Don't go walking about like that, you'll get cold. [4]In an extreme way, the wallpaper was the narrator's escape from worldly confinement. The restraints within the nursery, such as the barred windows and "rings and things in the walls" [2] are symbolic of the fact that the narrator is a prisoner in her own home: she is forced to rest herself and is "absolutely forbidden to 'work'" [3] until she is well again. Imprisonment, tyranny and subjugation brings about the narrator's mental breakdown and the dominating feature of the room represents the narrator's state of mind as she looses her grip on reality. The room where the narrator has to spend her time is symbolic of the conditions that eventually make her lose her mind, and the most dominant feature in the room is the yellow wallpaper with its "torturing" [1] pattern. Through looking at the symbolism of the wallpaper we see that it can be read as representing the patriarchal society prevalent at that time, and also as a representation of the narrator's mental state, and how it changes throughout the course of the text. The wallpaper is symbolic of the state of mind of the narrator. The narrator manages to escape her husband's control, albeit through a descent into madness. She eventually escaped the shackles of her husband, and was now controlled by her own insanity.
Common topics in this essay:
Perkins Gilman,
yellow wallpaper,
Yellow Wallpaper,
escape husband's,
narrator's mental,
husband's control,
|
Acceptance Essays
