Yellow Wallpaper Madness

On the Yellow Wallpaper Road to Madness
Charlotte Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to examine the suffocating roles that denied women freedom of expression. In the 19th century, women were expected to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers within the household. All for the sake of their families. In this time period females were expected to be content with their lives at hand and nothing more. People saw women to be solely within the domestic part of the world. The ones that dared to do anything but the social norm were deemed low individuals by society. The story describes a new mother who is imprisoned inside a small room within a big house by her husband. The unnamed woman’s husband is also her physician, whom is the
The wallpaper plays an immense role in developing the mental illness of the narrator. From the moment the narrator enters the “nursery” she is completely appalled by the yellow wallpaper that is before her. Stating, “I never saw worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (34). The narrator thinks the wonderful room is awful, especially the unpleasant yellow wallpaper. As John continues to not be of any encouragement the narrator takes it upon herself to make sense of the wallpaper. The narrator becomes obsessive over the wallpaper, watching it throughout the day and night. Even getting defensive and jealous over the interactions of others with the wallpaper. The narrator states, “I know she [Jennie] was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself” (166). The narrator sees the wallpaper and what is behind it as only hers, it is something she is not willing to share with others. As she continues to be mesmerized by the wallpaper it becomes more clear to her and she starts to see a formless figure from behind the main pattern. A desperate woman emerges to be trapped within the wallpaper, constantly crawling to look for an escape from what resembles the bars of a cage. “The discoveration of the woman promises a moment of liberation for the narrator; she has found a symbolic representation of her own condition” (Kasmer). The lady stuck within the wallpaper represents herself and the freedom she wants. Gilman uses the woman within the wall as a doppelganger to the narrator. Being that they are in same like situations, both struggling with the imprisonment of the domestic world they should not overstep. Both unable to escape without being strangled by the bars of social norms and expectations society holds over them. In the narrators mind she has to hide how she feels, so she plays herself out through the