Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a woman that is driven insane by depression. Characterization reveals issues about identity in the story. She appears to see an image along the wallpaper which is just her shadow. Her being alone a lot and left abandoned in her room with nothing to do, she becomes delusional. With “barred windows for little children and rings and things in the walls” the room is much like her prison (Gilman ). Even the pattern on the wallpaper “at night in any kind of light, twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all moonlight, becomes bars” as if she is caged (Gilman). She refers her room as a prison and begins to stare at the wallpaper and it begins to become an escape from isolation as the story continued.…show more content…
When her husband John says: “bless her little heart; she shall be as sick as she pleases” we catch glimpses of his childlike treatment of her (Gilman). He refers her body as an infant when he suggests the word “little”. When he says she is “as sick as she pleases” he is trying to refer it as in a child escaping doing chores and getting sick. Which is what was said about women who suspected of trying to escape housework and sexual duties (Gilman). This childlike treatment of her, and his misdiagnosis, is the cause of her segregation; which is the root cause of her eventual insanity. Just as the narrator feels trapped in her marriage she later begins to see that the woman is trapped in the paper and “is all the time trying to climb through”. She eventually sees herself and the woman as one in the same and explains that she came out of the paper. As the narrator falls deeper in her illness she is able to escape the confines of her marriage and medical treatments, just as the woman is finally able to free herself from the pattern in the paper. I believe this is Gilman showing that woman really has no way to free herself from ideas of the time and that insanity may be such an
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