The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

Expressive Rights Freedom is a right all people have but women who are imprisoned in a domestic marriage lose that right and are unable to convey themselves the way they should. In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Gilman a woman and her husband move into a large secluded house. The husband, being an intelligent physician, informs his wife that this would be the best cure for her illness. The wife wanting to please her husband does as he says. She becomes fascinated and oddly obsessed with the wallpaper in the bedroom. This fascination causes her to become even more insane then she was in the beginning. Charlotte Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper and other works express the idea that women forced to remain in a domestic marriage are trapped from expressing themselves. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman expresses through the husbands demanding nature, the wife’s willingness to listen, how the wife feels at the end of the story, and the placement of women in her opinion that if women are forced to remain in a domestic marriage, they are unable to express themselves. For example, when the wife is explaining her husband’s standpoint on her condition she says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? . . .”(287). This shows that the wife feels as if she must listen to her husband because he is a physician and he is her husband even if she does not necessarily believe he is right. This clearly relates to the authors message of the feeling of entrapment by the husband. The wife clearly has no say in her condition or her treatment. In other words she is trapped into believing that because her husband is a workingman, he is always right and she should follow. In addition, the narrator adds, “My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing”(287).

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