Control Of Women In The Yellow Wallpaper

In the late 1800’s, the dynamic of men and women made it so women were inferior to men. Women were looked upon as having no impact on society other than to have children and take care of the home. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world controlled by men. The men held the jobs, received educations, and ruled society. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator experiences this kind of control from her husband, John. While reading the story, it appears that a woman is going delusion, but in the end it is made clear that a woman is just trying to gain her freedom. "The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses the theme of the control men have on women in society.
The control men have on women is shown by the way …show more content…
The narrator does not want to be in the room her husband makes her live in. The windows are barred and the bed is bolted down. This is a subliminal clue of control. The walls are covered in the horrible yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is peeling leaving the narrator feeling repelled when she looks at it. John leads her to believe there is not enough room in the other rooms except for the cellar. She chooses to stay in the big room. As time goes on, she grows fond of the room and eventually the wallpaper. The narrator spends most of her time alone, leaving her with not much to do other than look at the wallpaper. Her primary form of entertainment has become attempting to figure out the wallpaper’s pattern. Her obsession grows, the pattern of the wallpaper becomes clearer. The wallpaper begins to resemble a woman “stooping down and creeping”(385) behind the main pattern, which looks like the bars of a cage, symbolizing the way the narrator is trapped in her …show more content…
She creeps endlessly around the room, smudging the wallpaper as she goes. The narrator says “I have locked the door and thrown the key into the front path. I don't want to go out , and i dont want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him.” (389) When John breaks into the locked room and sees the full horror of the situation, he faints in the doorway, so that the narrator has “to creep over him every time!”(390) This "creeping" is in reference to the woman behind the paper, but at the end she says that she herself is "creeping". All this tying with the fact that there are gymnastic rings secured into the wall and the fact that her husband faints when he sees her leads the reader to believe the narrator hanged herself. This action was the only way to escape the control of her