Finding The Meaning Behind The Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper

The life of a woman wasn’t that easy back then in the 1800s. Gilman wrote a short story describing the point of view of the roles in society, the story was her way of bringing together women’s oppression to light. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in January 1892, is a short story about a woman who has given birth to her first child, she suffers from depression and her husband locks her inside a room with yellow wallpaper where she fanaticizes with its color and patterns. The narrator’s husband, John, a regarded doctor, analyzes her conduct as anxiety. Perkins-Gilman uses symbolism and characterization to show readers how restricted the lives of women were.

In the story, the woman describes the wallpaper as: “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight...” (Perkins-Gilman 649). This sentence in the story describes the narrator's sickened with the yellow aura. The illuminations of visuals are in the delineations of impure yellow and blurry orange. As the story advances, the narrator collects vicious images and cleave sentences to describe the aura, illuminating the falling of her mental state.

This paragraph in the story is describing us imagery the narrator explains “ At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (Perkins-Gilman 653). The narrator feels trapped when it gets dark inside her room she sees the patterns like bars, she sees the house as a prison. This can be proved when she says “ there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people” (Perkins-Gilman 650). In this paragraph, I’ll be talking about characterization about the narrator. At the very end of the story she said, ' I've got out at last,' said I. ' in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back! '(Perkins-Gilman 656). Throughout the story, the narrator is baffled with everyone and later on, she imagines a woman trapped behind the wallpaper of her room. In the end, the woman entrapped behind the yellow wallpaper was, in fact, herself. Her fascination with the wallpaper led to her insanity to take complete control of her mindset. In the quote, the readers may understand that the narrator is feeling free from feeling entrapped and plans to never go back. Maybe she would much likely build a new life for herself she’s finally free from her husband’s shadow.

In the story, the narrator describes what women went through back in the day. They didn’t have that much to say. They would have to listen to the husband because back then women didn’t have freedom of any kind. People believed men were an important role, and they had all the freedom while women were just left behind, and they just lived among a man’s shadow.