THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

With the turn of the twentieth century, women encountered a challenging position that
required considerable changes in order to stay up with the ongoing democratic process in the western
world. This is when gender issues gained new relevance. Women continued to face indignity and
prejudice despite great advances in social equality. Charlotte Gilman, who confronted all of the
challenges associated with gender issues in her own experience, wrote her classic novella "The Yellow
Wallpaper" in this scenario. For the time in which it was written, the author provides a very progressive
viewpoint on gender problems. During that period, women's roles in society were not important; they
had few job prospects and a demanding responsibility in the household. Broadly speaking, this
groundbreaking work of feminist literature exhorts readers to reconsider the position of women in
society and to correct a number of daily injustices that they encounter. A significant work of early
feminist literature is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short novel "The Yellow Wallpaper," which was originally
published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. The narrative spends a significant amount of
time on topics linked to nineteenth-century attitudes toward women, their status in society, and their
physical, emotional, and mental health. The novel is based on the author's personal experience, which
she says she gained as a result of her own mental health issues. The author's biography reveals the
intriguing information that Charlotte Gilman struggled with her mental health and sought treatment
from a physician. He then gave her a prescription for a course of treatment that mostly involved
isolating her from society and restricting any mental work, which only served to make her illness
significantly worse.

The young woman and her spouse make up the pair in the story. She has "temporary nervous
depression" after their kid is delivered, and he makes her take a rest cure. During their summertime
vacation at a colonial mansion, the narrator spends the majority of the time in an upstairs nursery. The
story has made remarkable use of a seemingly unreliable narrator in to gradually unveil the extent to
which her husband has "imprisoned" her due to her physical and mental condition: she goes on to
describe tattered wallpaper, bars on the windows, metal rings in the walls, a floor "scuffed and gouged
and splintered," a bed bolted to the floor, and a gate at the top of the staircase, but tries to blame all
these on children that must have taken up residence there. The narrator devotes many journal entries
to describing the wallpaper in the room – its "sickly" color, its "yellow" smell, its bizarre and disturbing
pattern like "an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions," its
missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it.
She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate,
especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become
increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design. Eventually, she
comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must free the
woman in the wallpaper, she begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall. When her husband arrives
home, the narrator refuses to unlock her door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping
around the room, rubbing against the wallpaper, and exclaiming, "I've got out at last... in spite of you."
He faints, but she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it,
believing herself to have become the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.

The story has complex and deep meaning into it. By reading the short story named “The Yellow
wallpaper”, we have seen complex and deep use of literary devices. This thesis is to analyze what the
story is really about and what is its effectiveness and objectives as well as the author’s message for the
viewers and society.

The first evident theme in the story is repression. Even more than the physical ones, the
narrator's mental restrictions are what finally make her nuts. She is compelled to conceal her worries
and anxiety in order to maintain the appearance of a happy marriage and to appear to be triumphant in
her battle with melancholy. She is forced to become utterly passive and is barred from engaging in any
mental activity during the "resting cure," which is the most excruciating component of her therapy from
the start. John repeatedly reminds her to exercise self-discipline and manage her imagination because
he thinks it may run away with her. Writing is especially forbidden. “I did write for a while in spite of
them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy
opposition.” This sentence clearly shows that the narrator is experiencing repression.

The second evident theme in the story is self-expression. The secret that the narrator confides
to her journal concerns the paradox of receiving treatment from a doctor who doesn’t believe the
patient is ill. Writing down how she really feels, and in this case, what she really suspects about her
treatment, gives the narrator relief. Even though she feels she cannot share this suspicion with anyone
else—or maybe she already did and had her ideas rejected—she experiences respite from her anxiety in
expressing the observation. The fact that her husband/doctor forbids her self-expression shows the lack
of understanding that exists between them, resulting in her worsening mental health. “John is a
physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great
relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” This statement shows that her
inability so express her feelings is one reason for her illness to not disappear early.

The third evident theme in the story is infantilization. The narrator reveals John’s response after
she complains about having to sleep in the room with the yellow wallpaper. His response may seem
sympathetic, if condescending, but his exaggeration of what she requests—she just wants to sleep in a
lower-level room—reveals that he never takes her request seriously. In fact, John’s response reveals he
doesn’t take her feelings seriously, either. Readers discover that he neither white-washes the cellar nor
considers allowing the narrator to sleep in a different room. John intends his words to soothe her in the
moment until she forgets the matter—as one would expect of a small child. “Then he took me in his
arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down cellar, if I wished, and have it
white-washed into the bargain.”