Restriction In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

There is no such thing as total freedom for there’s always some sort of restriction. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a young woman is forced to live in a house as confined as her own mind, surrounded by a garden and world as open as the rest of society, which is to say walled off and locked with a facade of being free. In this story Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates the theme of freedom and confinement through her use of diction and figurative language used to describe the setting. When describing the house, Gilman says, “the windows are barred for children,” (Gilman, p608) just like the mind of our unreliable narrator, not allowing her to be free, forcing her to look through bars to get a glimpse of the outside world. There is also a “great immovable bed that looks like its been through wars.” (p612, 610) That bed, the very place the narrator is supposed to sleep is nailed down, immovable, restricting the freedom of the room, the house and the choices of our narrator and her …show more content…
Out there is seemingly far more open, free and pleasant than the bedroom and the big colonial mansion, but the garden too has its bars, locks, walls and restrictions. “The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.” (p608) This quote shows the house in the house has so much free space surrounding it, enough for people to run about in, be free in and not realize the the whole space is surrounded. “It reminds me of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.” (p608) This quote romanticizes the outside as a place from a storybook, yet still sanctioned off by walls and gates that lock, and the little separate places for different people, like the little molds society creates to press people into to make them more uniform and