Essay On The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman engages the audience into the inner self of a young mother and wife throughout the story. The story has grown from a remedy to depression to a female defiance to a male society. Gilman’s purpose in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the courage a woman had to demonstrate a positive change in her self-identity and free her from the social, domestic, and psychological confinement that were placed on women in the 1800’s. By writing the story from a first-person feministic point of view the narrator shows the struggle of women’s independence and individuality in a male dominated society through gender stereotype that exist between the society and the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the story, the wife is
She studies the wallpaper so much that she loses her grasp on reality and lets the wallpaper overtake her. She says, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, look forward to, to watch” (Pg.493). Her constant studying of the wallpaper leads her to the discovery of her doppelganger or herself in the wallpaper. Barbara Hochman, who wrote “The Reading Habit and The Yellow Wallpaper” said, “Critics of the last twenty years have devoted a great deal of attention to the writing on the wall and have suggested that the wallpaper tells the tale of nineteenth century women, rendered querulous, infantile, and passive by the restriction imposed upon them” (Pg. 91). The hope for all of those who read “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that they can understand the narrator becomes her own individual by finding herself in the wallpaper. The narrator desires to write and instead of writing on a piece of paper, she transcribes herself on the wallpaper. The wallpaper turns into her journal but it isn’t what the narrator writes or reads, but it is what she