The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay

The Living Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story telling the struggles of a new mother fighting within herself for her freedom and independence. At the center of the story is a narrator who remains anonymous until the end of the story. At the end Gilman will “force readers to reconsider Jane’s entire narrative by means of the story’s conclusion, when Jane finally speaks her own name for the first time as she creeps over her husband’s inert body” (Barth 4724). Gilman uses point of view, irony, and symbolism to help the reader understand the role of women at the turn of the twentieth century. A brief examination of these tools will show how “The Yellow Wallpaper” achieves its stirring effect. Gilman decides to keep the narrator’s identity a secret from the readers until the end of the story. She …show more content…
Gilman uses symbolism to give further meaning to the wallpaper, the room Jane stays in, the rest cure, and the garden she sees outside of the barred windows. The wallpaper is a symbol of entrapment. A reader could describe the wallpaper as tormenting because it is “a sulphurous yellow paper, torn off in spots, and patterned with “lame uncertain curves” that “plunge off at the outrageous angles” and “destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions”” (Gilbert and Gubar 125). The entrapment is both of the narrator and the woman Jane sees in the wallpaper, “eventually it becomes obvious to both reader and narrator that the figure creeping through and behind the wallpaper is both the narrator and the narrator’s double” (125). Jane eventually loses herself to the wallpaper. She allow her mind to trap itself into the figure she sees moving along the yellow wallpaper. She keeps this to herself until the end of the story. She doesn’t allow John to see that she is falling into a further entrapment until he comes to take her home because he believes she has gotten