Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates a woman who is overcome with depression. The story is written from the perspective of the woman herself through her journal which she hides from everyone else. Within her journal it is clear that her husband dictates her every move, from when she has company to where she sleeps (the room with the ugly yellow wallpaper), and believes that she only needs rests and a clear head to feel better. However, within the room with the yellow wallpaper she begins to become obsessed with its hideous color and supposed hidden pattern. Throughout the story, the woman’s depression and loneliness grows which is expressed through her crying at random times and becoming engrossed by the wallpaper. Her high point is when she sees a woman entrapped by the wallpaper. She then plans to and executes ripping off the wallpaper to help the woman escape. In the end, the woman she helped escape was herself.
Within The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Gilman is expressing her view on domestic life. Gilman argues that women are oppressed and driven mad by having a domestic life. She executes her argument through multiple strategies. Gilman employs italics, parenthesis, and repetition in order to emphasize her key issues. However, her most important and impactful strategies are allusion and symbolism. Gilman alludes to the works of Mitchell, who believed in extreme therapies such as electroshock for the mental ill, in order to express how he was incorrect. She also alludes to Mitchell to express that it is not the treatment that needs to be changed in the protagonist’s life but her life itself. Also employed in The Yellow Wallpaper, symbolism is seen throughout the piece. The yellow wallpaper itself is a symbolism of the main character’s life. It is ugly and tearing away, such as she is in her mental state, but within it is a pattern she grows to enjoy. However this pattern grows into an obsession where it turns into an entrapment. The pattern becomes a prison for the woman that the protagonist sees inside. In the symbolic point of view, the wallpaper is the main character’s domestic life. She is entrapped by the duties she is meant to abide by for her husband as the woman is entrapped by the wallpaper. However, at the end of the story when she rips the wallpaper down it is symbolic of her gaining her freedom. The main character is ripping the wallpaper off the wall to free the woman inside but is ultimately taking herself out of the control of her domestic life and freeing herself. This is illustrated in the symbolism and the woman exclaiming to her husband, “I’ve got out at last…in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” She has gone against her husband and away from her domestic life—the wallpaper.
A Girl and Her Heels
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