The Yellow Wall-Paper And Women's Rights

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Women’s Rights When I first started reading the short story the “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I did not know what to expect. The story was written by Gilman, who suffered from a mental disorder. It starts off talking about a woman and her husband staying in a colonial mansion for the summer. Is this a love story about a couple spending a romantic summer in a colonial mansion? Then she mentions a haunted house and I thought, could this be a horror story. Next, she talks about her husband John, their marriage and the fact that she is ill. The author is a woman that is feeling trapped within herself and uses the story as a symbolism of her feelings of not only her illness, but the fact that …show more content…
She was advised to only “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again” as long as she lived. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 791) The story reveals a woman that is suffering from a mental illness and feels trapped. The house has been unoccupied for many years and is in desperate need of repairs. She asks if they can do some renovations, but John refuses because they will only be there in the summer when the renovations are finished in their home. The couple decides to make the upstairs children’s nursery their bedroom; it is the most spacious of all the rooms in the house. The room was originally a nursery, then playroom and gymnasium. The room takes up most of the whole floor and is filled with light. The windows are barred for little children and there is yellow wallpaper that is stripped off in great patches around the head of the bed and low down on the other side of the room, this is the worst paper she has ever seen. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 793) As the story continues, the woman goes against her doctor’s advice and secretly starts to write while her husband is away at work. When her husband returns, she hides her writings …show more content…
She studies the paper carefully and in the pattern, she describes seeing “two bulbous eyes staring at you upside down.” (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 795) The eyes appear to her to crawl up and down and sideways, they are unblinking and everywhere. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 795) Like in the story, women must have felt that they were always under the watchful eye of their husbands. She describes the wallpaper as “sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror.” She begins to see a figure of a woman stooping down and creeping around the borders of the room behind the pattern, the figure appears to want to be released from her boundaries. The woman in the story continues to examine the woman behind the wallpaper and sees her more clearly than anyone else. She believes that there are a great many women at times behind the wallpaper and sometimes only one and she crawls around very fast and shakes it all over. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 800) She thinks that the woman behind the wallpaper gets out during the day and she has seen her creeping around the garden. She doesn’t want anyone to find her out at night, but herself. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C 801) Suddenly on the last day the woman and her husband are to