Who Is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Struggle In The Yellow Wallpaper

Society is much different today than it was back in the nineteenth century. Women did not have a say in anything. They could not vote or participate in the workforce. Women were not permitted to speak in public before an audience or give evidence in court. When a woman married, her husband owned everything she had, including her children. When a woman’s husband dies, she is entitled to only one third of his estate. Women have nowhere to exercise their personal freedom and feel belittled to the male race. After reading the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, it is easy to see that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was trying to show the struggle of domination between men and women in the nineteenth century. This short story is about a woman who suffers …show more content…
The narrator in the story eventually escapes her husband’s control, but at the cost of her own sanity.
The narrator of Gilman’s story is living in an isolated house “three miles from the village” (Gilman). She is ordered by her husband, who is also her doctor, to stay in bed, suppress her imagination, and to stop writing. The woman allows herself to be submissive to men. This submission shows her lack of self-confidence and feeling that women are lower than men. She believes that her own opinions do not count. Among all the varieties of restraints in her room, the yellow wallpaper itself seems to have an adverse effect on her. It completely strips her from her sanity. This wallpaper is one of the largest symbols in the story. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes the state of mind the narrator is in. She spends all of her time isolated in a room with nothing to look at but this ugly, yellow wallpaper that she ends up becoming obsessed with it. She describes the wallpaper as an object of surveillance with eyes watching her every move. The narrator traces the pattern time and time again and soon becomes convinced that there is a woman …show more content…
The Yellow Wallpaper is an excellent story that demonstrates what kind of struggle women everywhere had to go through in terms to be heard or respected. This story was written during a time that women were treated inferior to men, and their suffrage was hardly spoken of. Therefore, the insanity that consumes the narrator cannot be linked to her husband’s diagnosis of a nervous disorder. Through detailed descriptions of the wallpaper throughout the story, Gilman reveals the restrictions and constraints placed upon women by