In her time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was best known for her crusading journalism and feminist views. Eventually, her writing became an illustration of the beliefs towards the women’s movement in the 19th century. In Gilman’s 1913 essay, The Yellow Wallpaper, she recreates her experience of suffering from severe depression and relates how the advice of “rest cure” proved to be utterly catastrophic and detrimental to her personal well-being. Through the use of strong literary elements, she is able move through the story, continually developing her characters in order to depict the challenges of oppression and societal views placed on women at this time. In this piece, Gilman portrays an unidentified woman whose mental stability spirals out
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“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (653). The moonlight leaves readers with an eerie feeling, a sort of mysterious aspect that allows the imagination to explore the depths of darkness. The narrator notices the most changes when the dim lighting of the moon appears. The light begins to shed more awareness on her life. The wallpaper resembles bars that confine her in her world of solitude and disdain. The only time that she is able to take notice of these thoughts is alone, in the dark, where no one else can see her or know what she is doing. This leads to believe that the narrator may have been pushed in to this life, pushed in to imprisonment, unable to get out, darkness of her life entrapping her. This is in stark contrast with how she views the paper in the daylight. “By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour” (653). In the day, the narrator is forced to the confinements of her bedroom. She must hide what she does, and appear to be completely aloof, all the while, driving herself mad with the idea of the paper’s ever-changing pattern. As the narrator realizes the changing characteristics of lighting, the more she is able to shed light on to her own personal situation. As day turns in to night, just as the pattern changes, it suggests the narrator begins to feel a change. She is able to begin to free her mind from her every day life. She is able to focus more on what she wants out of the wallpaper, and how the changing of the light leads to this recognition. While the wallpaper serves as the narrator’s prison, it reveals a disintegration of her mind,
“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (653). The moonlight leaves readers with an eerie feeling, a sort of mysterious aspect that allows the imagination to explore the depths of darkness. The narrator notices the most changes when the dim lighting of the moon appears. The light begins to shed more awareness on her life. The wallpaper resembles bars that confine her in her world of solitude and disdain. The only time that she is able to take notice of these thoughts is alone, in the dark, where no one else can see her or know what she is doing. This leads to believe that the narrator may have been pushed in to this life, pushed in to imprisonment, unable to get out, darkness of her life entrapping her. This is in stark contrast with how she views the paper in the daylight. “By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour” (653). In the day, the narrator is forced to the confinements of her bedroom. She must hide what she does, and appear to be completely aloof, all the while, driving herself mad with the idea of the paper’s ever-changing pattern. As the narrator realizes the changing characteristics of lighting, the more she is able to shed light on to her own personal situation. As day turns in to night, just as the pattern changes, it suggests the narrator begins to feel a change. She is able to begin to free her mind from her every day life. She is able to focus more on what she wants out of the wallpaper, and how the changing of the light leads to this recognition. While the wallpaper serves as the narrator’s prison, it reveals a disintegration of her mind,