The Yellow Wallpaper The Cage Analysis

The Cage During the late 1800’s, the first wave of the women’s rights movement was just gaining speed and followers. Women of this age were beginning to break away from the notion that they were children and that they did not have the freedoms of speech, religion, and the right to vote. The women who werewhere rising up to start this movement belonged to a generation with a completely different mentality from that of their predecessors who openly scoffed at their silly daughters for believing the notion that women could indeed have an opinion that differed from her husband’s opinion. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) the breakdown of how men visualized women and how women broke free from their cage is presented …show more content…
In the beginning of her narrative the narrator tells us about her husband, her baby, of the beautiful home they have rented for the duration of the summer, and of her mental illness and prescribed treatment. She tells us about the loving, enforcement of the “rest treatment” that her husband gives her. Under this treatment she is not allowed to read, write, or do much thinking. She tell us about how she feels guilty for being ungrateful of the loving treatment of her husband and her sister-in-law, Jennie. She tries her best to do as her husband says, but eventually she can stand the tedium no longer and she secretly starts to write a journal about her day to day life. She says, “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” (Gilman 479). As our narrator becomes more aware of what she thinks is good for her, mainly stimulation and people, she tries to assert her will for herself over her husband’s will for her, but her husband will not hear of it. She later goes on to tell us about how she wanted to go and visit her family members and how her husband refused to let her go. This lack of stimulation that her husband is forcing on her is slowly driving her out of her mind. She starts to imagine that there is a shady figure in the wallpaper in her bedroom. This shady figure gains form and a life of its own as the story progresses. This is proof of her sanity slipping away. Her sanity is leaving her from a lack of stimulation. No matter what time you live in, there will always be people who lose touch with reality because there is an absence of stimulation in their brain. Today this can take the form of video games, apps, and