A Woman’s Journey into Insanity in Relation to Feminism The Yellow Wallpaper is a short fiction, written by Charlotte Gilman; an American author who was born in Hartford, and who suffered from a lonely childhood due to her father’s abandonment. She worked as an art teacher and married the artist Charles Stetson, who turned her married life into a nightmare full of sadness and gloom. Her depression and illness came after giving birth to her daughter. Gilman committed suicide later, after she discovered that she had a deadly illness. Gilman’s work in the Yellow Wallpaper conveyed the miserable life of a married woman, a life very similar to her own. Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper which mirrored what she had been through her entire life.
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Gilman has written this story in purpose to share her own struggle with the world in urging the community to cooperate with the women society, in giving them the right and the freedom they want. Through the story the narrator describes her own journey that led her to insanity and her obsession with the wallpaper of her sanitarium, and ends with seeing a woman "crawling" (Gilman 486) behind the "bars" (Gilman 487) of the prisonlike pattern. Her attempts to free the woman behind the wallpaper as "trying to purge her of her color, to peel her from the yellow paper, so that the narrator can accept this woman as herself."(Nadkarni 223) The yellow wallpaper represented women in the 19th century where their own right are controlled under men’s authority. The narrator saw herself as she is a part of “the wallpaper and that the wallpaper is part of her.” Therefore, by freeing the woman, the narrator will not only have her sanity back, but also she will be able to liberate all women of her …show more content…
The story reflects the role of woman back then and somehow urges the new generation to not have the same experience, and that was represented clearly through the wallpaper and the relationship between the narrator and the woman behind the wallpaper. Also, the choice of color plays an important role in the advancement of the character’s illness that affects it left on her psychologically. Hence, the yellow wallpaper is a well written story that represents women’s struggle at Gilman’s period of time, which also allowed her to express her point of view towards the unfairness of what was happening to the woman’s society in terms of a social and psychological
Gilman has written this story in purpose to share her own struggle with the world in urging the community to cooperate with the women society, in giving them the right and the freedom they want. Through the story the narrator describes her own journey that led her to insanity and her obsession with the wallpaper of her sanitarium, and ends with seeing a woman "crawling" (Gilman 486) behind the "bars" (Gilman 487) of the prisonlike pattern. Her attempts to free the woman behind the wallpaper as "trying to purge her of her color, to peel her from the yellow paper, so that the narrator can accept this woman as herself."(Nadkarni 223) The yellow wallpaper represented women in the 19th century where their own right are controlled under men’s authority. The narrator saw herself as she is a part of “the wallpaper and that the wallpaper is part of her.” Therefore, by freeing the woman, the narrator will not only have her sanity back, but also she will be able to liberate all women of her …show more content…
The story reflects the role of woman back then and somehow urges the new generation to not have the same experience, and that was represented clearly through the wallpaper and the relationship between the narrator and the woman behind the wallpaper. Also, the choice of color plays an important role in the advancement of the character’s illness that affects it left on her psychologically. Hence, the yellow wallpaper is a well written story that represents women’s struggle at Gilman’s period of time, which also allowed her to express her point of view towards the unfairness of what was happening to the woman’s society in terms of a social and psychological