Analysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper Written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote many tracts and books explaining feminist causes. This story has many features which make it interesting, this story clearly demonstrates role of women in 19th century and gender inequality. Moreover, how mental illness is subjected to “rest cure”. The story reveals that this sex division had the impact of keeping women in an immature condition of obliviousness. She is forced to hide her fear and anxiety and when she saw the yellow wallpaper she actively starts studying wallpaper to understand its meaning. Then she said, “It is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern”. In the same way she is trapped in 19th century mentality where they have to follow strict trajectory.

During 19th century most people think that women were delicate and more prone to madness and common treatment for their sickness is isolation and inactivity as in this story narrator loves reading and writing but her husband told him to avoid it as it is source of stress. Moreover, she was separated from her children and kept in bed which turned into silent madness. This story reveals that John’s assumption of his superior to women misjudge and dominate his wife. Narrator doesn’t have any right to say no to even small things and she was forced to hide her anxiety.

This story is a way to protest against medical oppression against women. She is entirely forbidden to use her mind to make her complete submissive. Women trapped behind the wallpaper represent her own binding. Narrator has hallucination due to no outside stimulation as part of her rest cure. Rest cure is about extreme bed rest, diet change, massage, seclusion. Narrator begins to hide her feelings from her husband and hides her journal when she hears him approaching and this demonstrates her struggling with rest cure “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal — having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition”. He starts thinking that pattern on wallpaper is about the women who is imprisoned in a cage and desperately trying to escape. Narrator start tearing the wallpaper as she is breaking the bars of cage and relates image with herself who is imprisoned in this society and dominated by male has no freedom to anything.

Narrator locked herself in the room and start tearing the wallpaper and made her free from the cage and john faints watching her condition and she start creeping nd says that “I’ve got out at last … and you can’t put me back. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”. She start relating the wallpaper with her condition like women in the wallpaper she freed herself from all the conditions of society.