Yellow Wallpaper
In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” A woman’s loneliness, isolation and wallpaper drive her to the brink of insanity. The lady’s husband keeps her locked in the upstairs nursery with this hideous yellow wallpaper that she can’t stand. She stays there because she has a nervous disorder and her husband and doctor think rest and isolation are the cure. She feels trapped in this room and there is symbolism in the story that reveals her feelings. “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with the windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was a nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings in the walls” (Page 573, Paragraph 9). The bars on the window symbolize a jailhouse and the rings in the wall can be perceived as old dungeon rings where one would be chained. There is also symbolism in the nailed down bed that symbolizes her feeling of entrapment. “I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down” (Page 576, Paragraph 13). One of the more interesting signs of symbolism is the lady in the wallpaper moving around and trying to get out. This symbolizes . . .
They get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” (Page 581, Paragraphs 9-10). And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern. In reality this could happen, but not to just anyone. The wallpaper that covers the four walls around her seems to drive her crazy. “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (Page 573, Paragraph 17). It is always the same shape, only very numerous. “It is fortunate that Mary is so good with the baby. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!” (Page 573, Paragraph 4). But nobody could climb through the pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. her very own feelings of wanting to be set free. She even gets the lady in the wallpaper to help her. And I am alone a good deal just now”(Page 576, Paragraphs 8-9). A person would have to be a little ill to begin with to begin hallucinating and seeing things in the wallpaper. When the climax and end of the story is revealed, her elevator clearly does not reach the top.
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