Yellow Wallpaper Conflict

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born July third, 1860, she published “the yellow wall paper” in may of 1892 and passed away on the seventeenth of august 1935.

“The yellow wallpaper” is a short story about a young middle-class woman who is suffering from what seems to be postpartum depression after giving birth, but with the time frame that the story is apart of she is diagnosed with “nervous depression…a slight hysterical tendency” by her husband/ doctor. Her illness is giving her insight into her condition in society, and marriage along with other females that are going through similar situations. As her treatment starts it beings robing her of her sanity.

Throughout the story a lot of events occurred, the main conflict in the story is the struggle that the narrator and her husband, who is additionally her doctor, over the course and treatment of her illness leads to conflict with in the narrators mind between her growing understanding of her own powerlessness and her desire to repress this awareness. The narrator chooses to keep a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her displeasure for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gradually develops into an obsession.
The narrator herself is a paradox: as she loses touch with the world she comes to a better understanding of who she really is.
At every point she is confronted with relationships, objects, and situations that appear harmless and natural but that are actually rather strange and even overbearing. In a sense, the plot of “the yellow wallpaper” is the narrators attempt to avoid acknowledging the extent to which her exterior condition stifles her inner
impulses.

As the narrator sinks further into her fascination with the wallpaper, she becomes increasingly more detached from her day-to-day life. The process of her disassociation begins at the beginning of the story, when she makes the decision to keep a secret diary as a “relief to her mind”. Gilman displays us the division in the narrator’s conscientiousness by having her puzzle over effects in the world that she caused. As an example, the narrator doesn’t instantly apprehend that the yellow stains on her clothing and the long “smooch” on the wallpaper are connected.

The yellow wallpaper itself is driven by the narrator’s awareness that the wallpaper is a “text” she must decode, that it represents something that affects her directly. Therefore, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first the ripped, soiled and “unclean yellow” wallpaper seems unlikable but after staring at the paper for hours she sees a eerie sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in a certain light. Ultimately, the sub patter emanates into focus as a distressed woman, constantly crawling and stopping, searching for a getaway from behind the main pattern, which has come to look like the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as draped with the heads of various women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to getaway. Evidently, the wallpaper represents the configuration of family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator found herself trapped behind. Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman expertly uses this frightening, repulsive wallpaper as a symbol of domestic life that traps so many women.