Summary Of The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story that centers on the narrator who is allegedly dealing with depression or “nervous depression” as it is referred to in the story. Throughout the period of her “rest cure” or recovery she is staying in a rented colonial mansion; the narrator is put into a room with yellow wallpaper. The setting becomes significant to the plot and theme of the story, which has to do with gender and free expression. It changes the character throughout the story and builds the conflict that the narrator is undergoing until the story hits its climax. The setting symbolizes how gender roles and limitation of free expression are different problems that work together to create the main conflict of the narrator.
The overlying themes of gender and free
The Narrator realizes that the woman in the pattern “is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern- it strangles so . . .” as she becomes obsessed with the paper (248). In the wallpaper there is the pattern, which is described as bars and the sub-pattern, which are women. The pattern of the wallpaper depicts how women are treated. Their opinions and self-beings are not comparable to that of men because they are oppressed, thus when you are strangled you can’t speak. Just like the figure in the pattern that is trapped. Additionally, while analyzing the wallpaper the narrator states “I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alteration, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else I ever heard of” (243). Basically the pattern she sees on the wall is nothing that she has ever seen. Since the pattern is a reflection of her own conflict, she is not seeing an ordinary women but rather a women who is not willing to conform to societal norms of gender