Women have been for a long time, and are still today, considered to be inferior to men. Since the first official feminist movement in the 1960s, women’s conditions have gradually gotten much better. However, when the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in 1892, women were most often seen only as their husband’s wife and nothing more. Still, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of that same story, decided to do something bold: through her use of irony, through her allusions to prisons when describing the house, and through her use of the yellow wallpaper as a symbol, she is openly criticizing the oppression of women.
First, Gilman uses irony to highlight how women are treated in a way that should not be. The narrator, for example, is sometimes very sarcastic and …show more content…
When the narrator starts observing the wallpaper and notices a woman behind the pattern for the first time, she describes her as “slooping down and creeping about” (94). This could be reminiscent of the way women had to hide from their husbands and family if they were doing anything a woman of the 1800s was not supposed to do. The author also mentions multiple times that the narrator sees the woman in the wallpaper most clearly during the night and that “[b]y daylight she is subdued, quiet” (96). This can be an allusion to the fact that, during the day, women had to play their part as a good housewife and mother but, during nighttime, they could be themselves and do whatever they wanted to do, as they were hidden from the eyes of their sleeping husband. Then, when the narrator has reached her highest state of insanity, she pulls the wallpaper off the walls and, as her husband enters the room, states that “[She’s] got out at last” (101). This demonstrates that the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper was indeed the narrator who was stuck in an oppressive marriage and is now
First, Gilman uses irony to highlight how women are treated in a way that should not be. The narrator, for example, is sometimes very sarcastic and …show more content…
When the narrator starts observing the wallpaper and notices a woman behind the pattern for the first time, she describes her as “slooping down and creeping about” (94). This could be reminiscent of the way women had to hide from their husbands and family if they were doing anything a woman of the 1800s was not supposed to do. The author also mentions multiple times that the narrator sees the woman in the wallpaper most clearly during the night and that “[b]y daylight she is subdued, quiet” (96). This can be an allusion to the fact that, during the day, women had to play their part as a good housewife and mother but, during nighttime, they could be themselves and do whatever they wanted to do, as they were hidden from the eyes of their sleeping husband. Then, when the narrator has reached her highest state of insanity, she pulls the wallpaper off the walls and, as her husband enters the room, states that “[She’s] got out at last” (101). This demonstrates that the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper was indeed the narrator who was stuck in an oppressive marriage and is now