By daylight, she sneaks with a delicate finger pressed to her ruby lips, effectively silencing others while keeping her own mouth tightly shut. Daylight keeps her captive until the moon rises, its supernal power granting the woman behind the wallpaper enough strength to shake and rip through with a deadly vengeance. The uncanny nature of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” ergo, seems to present its readers with an intriguing discourse concerning the issue of feminism. By utilizing the skillful juxtaposition of the common Victorian tropes of “The Angel of the House” versus that of “The Madwoman in the Attic,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman certainly encourages the dismantling the oppressive norms of patriarchal society, as well as offers a voice to a group whose
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It is, above all, beautiful, yet useless; fragile and confined to the inside of the home. But perhaps the most unsettling part of the wallpaper is its pattern, described as possessing “the strangest yellow color,” particularly irritating in its sub-patterns that can “only be seen in different lights” (795). The grotesque images, therefore, shift from night to day, with the moonlight exposing the parts of the design hidden by daylight. Moonlight, in all its cyclical power associated with the feminine, seems to be the catalyst that incites new discoveries within the pattern—the imprisoning “bars,” and the “women” behind the paper only coming out at night (799). To the narrator, it seems as though many heads have been strangled by its power, “turn[ing] them upside down, and [making] their eyes white” (801). If it is the femininity of the moon incites these revelations, one may infer that it is by the oppression of the patriarchal daylight that these women are strangled, eyes forced white, pure, and blind. These unseeing entities can easily be compared with the mindless personifications of the “Angels of the House,” women whose natural personalities have been turned topsy-turvy and rendered soulless. Their blankness also stirs images of the yet unwritten page, pristine in its lack of recorded thought; however, in doing so, it metaphorically solidifies Gilman’s idea that the individualized woman may resist male tyranny with the very real weapon of the written word, with those who adhere to that of the model of the Madonna figure forgo the opportunity to voice their opinion in exchange for
It is, above all, beautiful, yet useless; fragile and confined to the inside of the home. But perhaps the most unsettling part of the wallpaper is its pattern, described as possessing “the strangest yellow color,” particularly irritating in its sub-patterns that can “only be seen in different lights” (795). The grotesque images, therefore, shift from night to day, with the moonlight exposing the parts of the design hidden by daylight. Moonlight, in all its cyclical power associated with the feminine, seems to be the catalyst that incites new discoveries within the pattern—the imprisoning “bars,” and the “women” behind the paper only coming out at night (799). To the narrator, it seems as though many heads have been strangled by its power, “turn[ing] them upside down, and [making] their eyes white” (801). If it is the femininity of the moon incites these revelations, one may infer that it is by the oppression of the patriarchal daylight that these women are strangled, eyes forced white, pure, and blind. These unseeing entities can easily be compared with the mindless personifications of the “Angels of the House,” women whose natural personalities have been turned topsy-turvy and rendered soulless. Their blankness also stirs images of the yet unwritten page, pristine in its lack of recorded thought; however, in doing so, it metaphorically solidifies Gilman’s idea that the individualized woman may resist male tyranny with the very real weapon of the written word, with those who adhere to that of the model of the Madonna figure forgo the opportunity to voice their opinion in exchange for