Constant oppression and submission was expected of women in the nineteenth century, and they spent their lives being molded into the perfect housewife and mother, learning how to dote over a man and to please him constantly. The story of a young woman who was confined to a nursery for rest and the cure of her mental illness was first published in 1892. As her husband, John, refuses to remove wallpaper that disturbs her, she slowly becomes obsessed with it, and with what she sees in it. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s exaggerated autobiography, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the reader is immersed in a setting of disguised insanity and patriarchy through symbolism, and Gilman used her own life events to capture the emotion and drive of oppressed women in the nineteenth century through her narrator. Similar to how the narrator was bound to the nursery and the wallpaper, women of the nineteenth century were bound to roles of submission by supposedly superior male influence. Gilman used the yellow wallpaper to symbolize the confinement of women in the present society, and dependence on their male counterparts. Much as women could not separate themselves from men, it was “impossible for the narrator to get ‘that top pattern… off from the under one’… impossible to separate the text of a culture from the text of an individual, to free female subjectivity from the patriarchal text” (Lanser 29). As the pattern intensified, the narrator noted that the women she saw were trapped in the under section, and that the top would form bars that the woman would shake furiously in the night (Gilman 8). The aggressive action captures the magnitude of females being caged in by the societally dominant men. While the narrator gazes at the wallpaper, she observes the abstract figures of women creeping about the room, and how “the whole tribe of rebelling women are moving as if just learning to crawl” (Wagner-Martin 292). Relation to the female figures as crawling, or infantile, raises the question of having to be mindless to become free as a nineteenth century woman. Intellectual women were told to rest and let men handle the situation, like the narrator was by her husband. One of few solutions was to let oneself become a mindless child, to morph from role of maternity to child-like ignorance (Korb 287). In the end of the story, when John faints, the narrator is said to have “had to creep over him ever time,” that she circled the room (Gilman 15). Her evolution from watching the women in the paper creep and crawl to doing so herself shows her change to the same level of infancy. Crawling over John is symbolic in itself of women having to go out of their way to avoid the obstacles of the patriarchic society and male influence. Though the wallpaper can be read as a symbol of oppression, the narrator’s view of it can also be seen as a therapeutic escape from said oppression and illness.
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Symbolism of the nursery can be linked back to the postpartum depression in young mothers, as Gilman strategically “underscores her identity by placing her in a room that was formerly a nursery… barred windows… an infant would not be able to leave its nursery; neither is its mother” (Wagner-Martin 291). Women of the time did not work or go out without permission from the head of their household. Once having given birth, they were often not able to leave their child, confined to the permanent responsibilities of motherhood. The narrator hardly mentions the baby throughout the story due to not tending to it; yet, the nursery serves as a constant reminder of her newborn child (Gilman 3-4). As oppressed women were constantly treated as children, they often began behaving like a child and seeing from an infantile point of view. The room the narrator had wanted in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is noted to have only one window, and it is covered in roses (Gilman 2). A famous saying is that those with positive, naive mindsets, “view the world from rose-colored glasses.” Her desire for this room is showing her compulsion to obtain a rose-colored, childish view of reality, and to escape from her impending responsibilities by switching place with the child and taking its role in the family (Veered
Symbolism of the nursery can be linked back to the postpartum depression in young mothers, as Gilman strategically “underscores her identity by placing her in a room that was formerly a nursery… barred windows… an infant would not be able to leave its nursery; neither is its mother” (Wagner-Martin 291). Women of the time did not work or go out without permission from the head of their household. Once having given birth, they were often not able to leave their child, confined to the permanent responsibilities of motherhood. The narrator hardly mentions the baby throughout the story due to not tending to it; yet, the nursery serves as a constant reminder of her newborn child (Gilman 3-4). As oppressed women were constantly treated as children, they often began behaving like a child and seeing from an infantile point of view. The room the narrator had wanted in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is noted to have only one window, and it is covered in roses (Gilman 2). A famous saying is that those with positive, naive mindsets, “view the world from rose-colored glasses.” Her desire for this room is showing her compulsion to obtain a rose-colored, childish view of reality, and to escape from her impending responsibilities by switching place with the child and taking its role in the family (Veered