The Yellow Wallpaper Literary Analysis

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Danielle Obenauf English 226 Academic Journal 2 06/07/2015 Throughout Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the protagonist, Jane, is being consumed within her husband’s rules and mental imprisonment. From the beginning, the narrator is shown as a woman with no say in the matter of her own choices and is forced to stay inside with little to no activity involved. Her husband can be accused as the dominant of the two and because of that, the social critique within this piece of literature can be pin pointed toward the struggle of women being run by men. The narrator begins her journal by describing her and her husband as “…mere ordinary people…” (208). Her husband is a physician. As she furthers herself into the journal she says that her husband doesn’t believe she is sick, “…but temporary nervous…show more content…
She is torn between what she wants to do and what society wants her to do. She does love her husband and she states “he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more” (210), but this is the reason why she starts her secret journal and has to keep it from her husband. A lot of Jane’s writing is about the yellow-wallpaper within her bedroom, which she is practically forced to look at everyday. Eventually this wallpaper turns into her life and she starts to see how she is being consumed by society. While in this yellow-papered room one day, she says, “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars” (216)! Jane is beginning to feel trapped because she knows that her life is not going to change if she stays as the women known by society. The wallpaper is becoming her life and as she watches this wallpaper fall apart and become a creepy woman, she starts to realize that she can reverse her position with
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