Social Repression in The Yellow Wallpaper - 1275 Words

Social Repression in The Yellow Wallpaper â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison. Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world. The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality. This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery. The story unfolds as the nameless narrator’s condition is revealed. She is a common woman†¦show more content†¦He even becomes upset when she wishes to write, causing this story to be composed of writings she manages to do in secret. John places her in the attic of the mansion, like a dirty secret, in what she believes to be a former nursery. There is, however, strong evidence that the narrator is not the first mental patient to occupy the room - there are bars on the windows and gouges in the floor and walls; the bed is bolted down and has been gnawed on and the wallpaper has been torn off in patches. Confined to this room day after day, the narrator begins to study the wallpaper: . . . I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion. That â€Å"pointless pattern refers to the rigid pattern of complete subjugation to men that women of Gilmans day were expected to follow. A woman of that era was the property of her father until she married. She then became subject to her husband’s will with no legal rights and no authority to determine what was best for her. The narrator begins to see things in the pattern of the wallpaper: There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. This is indicative of the fate of those foolhardyShow MoreRelatedThe Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman999 Words   |  4 Pages â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† is a story of a woman s psychological breakdown, which is shown through an imaginative conversation with the wallpaper. The relationship between the female narrator and the wallpaper reveals the inner condition of the narrator and also symbolically shows how women are oppressed in society. The story, read through a feminist lens, reflects a woman s struggle against the patriarchal power structure. In the â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper†, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the wallpaperRead MoreComparison and Contrast of the Yellow Wallpaper and the Rose for Emily1078 Words   |  5 PagesParis Claypool Eng 120 Essay 1 06/12/2010 A Rose for Emily and The Yellow Wallpaper â€Å"A Rose for Emily’’ By William Faulkner and â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,† are two short stories that both incorporate qualities of similarities and difference. Both of the short stories are about how and why these women changed for lunacy. These women are forced into solitude because of the fact that they are women. Emily’s fatherRead MoreThe Cult Of The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman1371 Words   |  6 PagesMichael Zhao K. Keogh AP Lit. Period 3 22 January 2015 The Cult of Domesticity â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. 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Because the narrator is refused any self-expression while entrapped in a room of an ancestral mansion, she studies the wallpaper as a means of understanding its artistic pattern. The more she studies it, the more the paper takes on the qualities