Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an advocate for women’s rights, provides a story with a compelling message without a gaudy presentation. A title as simple as “The Yellow Wallpaper” may imply a lack of a complex motif but actually establishes its precedence in the story. The room containing the yellow wallpaper conveys many ideas, but most importantly, the limitation and figurative imprisonment in the societal structure. The severity of the woman’s attachment with the wallpaper progresses along the story’s progression. The author, Gilman, was a prominent activist for women’s rights and has displayed her advocacy through multiple other works such as Herland, and Women and Economics. Gilman creates a story where the main character is taken on a summer trip to a colonial mansion. She questions why exactly they are there and how they have come to purchase such an enormous house and because of the beauty of it, why has it been abandoned for so long. It is then revealed that she is a writer and is forced to stop for the good of her illness by those around her. The story then escalates further as she does into her insanity and when she begins seeing things in the walls. It drives her to complete insanity closing the story on a serious note.…show more content…
“It is the same woman, I know, for she’s always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight,” the woman she sees is an exact representation of herself. She sees her when she is locked in the room through the wallpaper when no one else is there. It is the representation of her being locked away by her husband, brother and her sister in law. In marriage the man holds all of the power or at least in her case, John claims her to be insane because of this he can just say that she is and his brother will believe him before her and the sister would because of the control expressed by
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