Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Life

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s life greatly related to The Yellow Wallpaper. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she wrote of a similar experience with rest cures while filling the role of mother and wife. She came to the realization that rest cures caused her to become weak and passive. This helped develop Gilman’s theories concerning a woman’s role in marriage and society. She became a prominent figure in American feminism by writing and lecturing for the reform of marriage and family (Gilman 34-47). In analyzing The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman was able to recreate the struggle of oppressed women by men and society and the constant battle to become their equal. John represented man’s superiority over women in marriage …show more content…
The wallpaper, being the fish bowel, was a representation of her life. She was a female trapped behind physical and psychological bars. She was unable to live her life freely. It takes the narrator some time to figure out the wallpaper, her life. She ultimately comes to the conclusion that she no longer wanted to be trapped behind bars. She wanted to make decisions for herself. Gilman’s representation of the narrator’s struggle with the wallpaper showed a female’s battle to find a voice and life of her own in a primarily male dominated …show more content…
She illustrated the hardships women faced physically and mentally. John’s character showed the dominant male role of husband. The insecurities of the female narrator showed the weak and inferior role of wife. Gilman represented a woman’s mind trapped with thoughts of her own, but no way to express them in the narrator’s writing. Finally, the yellow wallpaper itself representing the narrator’s life and the want to escape it. Gilman portrayed a gothic yet relatable story for her readers to liberate their minds from cultural inequalities into social