Life For Women In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lives for women in 1892 were heavily controlled by men. Women were treated as if they were inferior to men. Charlotte Perkins Gilman brings light to this problem in a interesting way. Gilman herself, was in fact driven to near madness and later claimed to have written “The Yellow Wallpaper” to protest this treatment of women like herself, and specifically to address her physician. Although they never replied to Gilman personally, they are said to have confessed to a friend that they had changed their treatment of hysterics after reading the story. While real life aspects are apparent it’s the symbolism and subliminal feminist in her story to show how a woman’s role in society is limited with no control or creative outlet. The oppression
It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commits every artistic sin”. The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she begins to see more than just the outer design. At first she sees “bulbous eyes” and “absurd unblinking eyes . . . everywhere”. The wallpaper consumes the narrator offering up more intricate images as time passes. She first notices a different colored sub-pattern of a figure beneath the top design. This figure is eventually seen as a woman who “creeps” and shakes the outer pattern, now seen as bars. This woman-figure becomes essentially the narrator’s doppelganger or double trapped behind the bars of her role in
As the story progresses, the narrator identifies more and more with the figure in the wallpaper, until she refers to herself in the third person. In this statement the narrator says, “‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane’”. This her breaking free and realizing that madness it her only actually escape from her controlling husband. Once her husband realizes that she completely mad he the switches roles with her. “Now why should that man have fainted?”. He is now the women in distress with no