"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman who is living in a rest home for the summer so she can recover from her illness. The doctors, which happen to be her husband and her brother, both claim that she only has temporary depression. She is not allowed to work and is stuck upstairs in the house in a room with yellow wallpaper. This wallpaper is falling apart and worn badly and the woman becomes increasingly obsessed with is, seemingly leading her to have a mental breakdown and true mental problems.
The setting used in this story plays a great role in the mood created by reading it. The story takes place in a rundown room in an old house. The wallpaper in the room is old and falling apart and has even been faded by the sunlight. The house that they are in is "quite three miles from the village". The narrator states that the house is surrounded by hedges and walls and gates. There is also a garden with trees and grape vines and the narrator says that there are broken down greenhouses around the property. This setting sets the story up to be a frightening story about a woman who has gone mad. It gives the house, and the story, a sense of eeriness. The reader gets the feeling that the house is isolated from civilization and surrounded by nature and small greenhouses and guest houses that have been neglected. The fact that she has psychological problems would not make this story frightening or even at least creepy. Without this setting it would be just a psychological thriller. The setting is what makes the story gothic. Also, the isolation could be one of the reasons the woman's condition got worse as the story progressed. She could be developing mental problems because she is isolated from society and surrounded by nature and really only interacts with her husband most of the time. The setting plays a very important role in setting the mood for this story.
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In the story, wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, is a symbol of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere. Over the course of the story, the wallpaper becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure.
ReplyDeleteWhen John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning. She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. Over time, as her insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her.
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-yellow-wallpaper/study-guide/major-themes/
this was definately one of my favortie stories i read. I agree with what hannah said about the feministic background to the story. what do others think about this?
ReplyDeleteI can defiantly see how it can be feministic, however I think it told more about a disease that females often have and having it brought to light by a woman who already lived through it. I think feminism much more different then just having a women telling a fiction story of what she went through.
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