Yellow Wallpaper Discussion Points
•In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses the horror tale to analyze the position of women within the institution of marriage, practiced by the “respectable “classes of her time.
•For the author, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained as second-class citizens.
•The story reveals that gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their full development.
•The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox or a contradiction, as she loses touch with the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner reality of her life
•The plot is the narrator’s attempt to avoid acknowledging the extent to which her external situation suffocates her inner situation.
•She remembers terrifying herself with imaginary nighttime monsters as a child, and she enjoys the notion that the house they have taken is haunted. Yet as part of her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions rebel at his treatment, and she turns her imagination on neutral objects—the house and the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration
•As she sinks further into her inner fascination with the wallpaper, she becomes more dissociated from her day-to-day life. Her disassociation begins when the story does, at the very moment she decides to keep a secret diary as “a relief to her mind.”
•her true thoughts are hidden from the outer world, and the narrator begins to slip into a fantasy world in which the nature of “her situation” is made clear in symbolic terms.
•When the narrator finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in the wallpaper, she is able to see that other women are forced to creep and hide behind the domestic “patterns” of their lives, and that she herself is the one in need of rescue
•The horror of
•For the author, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained as second-class citizens.
•The story reveals that gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their full development.
•The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox or a contradiction, as she loses touch with the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner reality of her life
•The plot is the narrator’s attempt to avoid acknowledging the extent to which her external situation suffocates her inner situation.
•She remembers terrifying herself with imaginary nighttime monsters as a child, and she enjoys the notion that the house they have taken is haunted. Yet as part of her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions rebel at his treatment, and she turns her imagination on neutral objects—the house and the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration
•As she sinks further into her inner fascination with the wallpaper, she becomes more dissociated from her day-to-day life. Her disassociation begins when the story does, at the very moment she decides to keep a secret diary as “a relief to her mind.”
•her true thoughts are hidden from the outer world, and the narrator begins to slip into a fantasy world in which the nature of “her situation” is made clear in symbolic terms.
•When the narrator finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in the wallpaper, she is able to see that other women are forced to creep and hide behind the domestic “patterns” of their lives, and that she herself is the one in need of rescue
•The horror of