Modernism In The Yellow Wall-Paper

Modernism is literature that represents changes in literary form and changes in society as these element become modern. These transformations are usually painful and uncomfortable. Modernist writers question traditional values and beliefs. Traditionally these stories have no true resolution and echo the feeling of loss. Generally modernist stories do not have a happy ending (Baym et al, 2013, p. 1847). Modernistic writers are purveying messages to try and break societies hold on their oppressive situations. Reoccurring themes I have seen in both The Yellow Wall-Paper and Street Scene are suppression of women, madness and the inability to find happiness without it being followed by tragedy. The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the story of a woman who felt isolated by her husband and by society. The woman who was narrating this story, is so limited in her life that she was not …show more content…
The patterns are how women should act, what they should wear, and other societal norms set up by the men who currently enslave their gender. The narrator then helps these women break out from behind the wallpaper. That was another example of modernism in writing because it was showing the change of women in society and their ability to break free from these patterns. The Yellow Wall-Paper ended as most modernistic stories do, there was no resolution. The reader knows there is no woman behind the wallpaper. The narrator in The Yellow-Wallpaper was still being held captive in a room, but now by her own choice because she has disposed of the key to the room, “I have locked the door and thrown the key down the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want anybody to come in, till John comes” (1892, p. 1680). The rest that was supposed to make the narrator better has driven her mad and she has torn all the wallpaper off the wall and has not actually been freed from societies hold on