Summary:
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a disheartening, feministic story written in a journal- like style with a first-person point of view. The journal entries are about the three months during which John, the narrator's husband, tries to cure his wife's "nervous condition," postpartum depression, which eventually leads to her complete mental breakdown.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a disheartening, feministic story written in a journal- like style with a first-person point of view. The journal entries are about the three months during which John, the narrator's husband, tries to cure his wife's "nervous condition," postpartum depression, which eventually leads to her complete mental breakdown. The passage I have chosen, the end and major climax, shows this breakdown through the structure of her writing that is fragmented and confusing, reflecting the narrator's current mental state. The theme of the entire story, and this passage, is feminism, and more specifically, how it affects and traps women.
In the beginning of the story, the narrator tries to get out of the room. She hates the wallpaper, the isolation, and being inside, oppressed. The last passage, however is a complete contrast to that. The narrator begins to "help" the once despised figure to get out from behind her bars in the paper by tearing it down. When Jennie, the maid, tries to get her to leave she refuses. She believes she is being tricked into leaving. By being oppressed by John, her motives have changed. Instead of wanting to leave and write, she ends up not wanting to leave what she now finds comfort and an odd sort of acceptance in. She has become so obsessed with the paper that she identifies with the trapped woman until, finally, she loses her individuality and merges with her. In fact, she believes that she has freed herself, as well as the woman, from the bars of the wallpaper. The paper is like society and the bars are its control over women. When she rips down the wallpaper she and the figure are now liberated, free of all male control. By tearing it down, she has defied her male oppressor and society.
Throughout the entire story, John controls every aspect of the narrator's life. He treats her as a child and dismisses her opinions and her judgments on the treatment for herself, just as the general society did in that time period. She represents the many women trapped behind the accepted social definitions of the female, lacking the courage and self-worth to confront a male, even though she knows that his treatment is not helping. In the end she does triumph over him, but she only manages to escapes into madness.
As the narrator succumbs to her inevitable madness, she creeps. Creeping is a sort of sneaky not quite out in the open motion. This is like early feminists who could not quite go out into the open. Instead they had to "creep" around the edge of society until they were accepted as what they were. The narrator in the story creeps around and around the wallpaper, the symbol of society, as a defiant act against her husband and his treatment.
True to the theme, the narrator breaks free of her husbands and societies control, but not in the way that she had once planned. Her oppression hindered her ability to think rationally for herself. She lost her individuality and became just another "creeping" woman. Yet, she still believes she is free when in reality she is more trapped than ever before. Because she has been trapped for so long, she denies herself a chance to be truly free.
This is the complete article, containing 553 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
