Women In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, it is understood that the narrator is a woman who has a mental illness but cannot overcome it due to her husband’s controlling ways. Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates the ideological victimization of many women of the early 19th century through a gothic tale of humor where women suffering from post-partum depression is isolated. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written in 1892, metaphorically illustrates the captive and oppressed state of women during those time period through which Gilman herself had experienced for many years with bouts of depression and anxiety and was advised to do the “rest cure” for nervous illness and depression. The woman in the story goes insane because her role in society is limited and her ability
to express herself creatively is repressed by her husband John. John who is a physician recognizes his wife’s state not knowing how severe her condition is and not have an adequate way of treating it. He decides to isolate and try to ‘cure’ her by locking her in the nursery in the already secluded mansion. The fact that a nursey was chosen for her symbolizes the way that women are treated like children. The nursery had “bars on the windows”, which is symbolic of imprisonment. Her husband’s way of ‘treating’ the protagonist’s illness leads to a conflict within her mind between her growing understanding and her desire to repress this awareness. So with nothing to stimulate her mind, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. “It is the strongest yellow that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper the smell! The only thing I can think of that it is like the color of the paper! A yellow smell.” In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around the pattern of the wallpaper trying to escape and comes to believe she is one of them, She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when they have to. “For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” This shows that she is basically loosing herself to understand herself. She has untangled the pattern of her life, but she has torn herself apart in getting free of it. Now she is ‘free’ of all the constraints of her marriage, her society, and her own efforts to repress her mind.