The Yellow Wallpaper enlightens the reader about women’s health, motherhood, mental disorders, and treatment. This story is about feminism and gender relations in America at the end of the XIX century. Although many details have changed, the story is semi-autobiographical. The author relies on her health crisis, particularly her fraught relationship with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. According to Gilman himself, he drove her to “mental anguish” before she refused his treatment and started writing again. In this, a new critical approach will be applied, reasoning and exploring how the characters of the text describe and emphasize the persecution of women over some time. The author uses these literary elements to show the mistreatment of women during the 19th century.
The wallpaper is the most prominent symbol in this story, which also acts as the main element of the text. In general, the wallpaper reflects the way of thinking of the main character. Their influence may show other symbolic effects showing how women were generally perceived in the 19th century (Roethle 151). Contradictory patterns, angles, and curves can effectively reflect the main character’s emotions. In addition, the author considers the wallpaper as a kind of psychological trap for the main character. It is a wallpaper that remains more and more in the narrator’s head with his “vicious influence.” Behind him, the dim shapes become more apparent every day, sometimes in many women, sometimes in one, bending down and crawling along with the pattern.
The exact color “yellow” also creates another important symbolic effect. For a long time in history, yellow was considered the color of illness and weakness, which to a certain extent, correlates with the madness from which the main character suffers. The author emphasizes how hard women faced oppression and struggle in everyday life. Acting as a symbolic metaphor indicating how limited women are, the adjectives used by the author indirectly suggest that the inequality of women created by men can be “disgusting” (Roethle 151). What men have done to women can also be “unreliable” (Roethle 154). Other adjectives, such as “infuriate” and “torment,” can also be seen as a reflection of a woman’s feelings in the 19th century, especially given the close relationship between color and wallpaper (Salayo and Macam 46). The author’s descriptions are directly related to the fact that she is forbidden to do anything because of the atmosphere. With the help of this symbol, the author tried to facilitate the perception of her opinion and convey the message of feminism to the public.
The author’s images of barred windows serve as symbols of women’s retention, indicating the social perception of women’s roles. Windows has long presented an idea of the possibilities in various literary texts, but in this text, it nevertheless became a gateway to access the world (Salayo and Macam 46). All possibilities open through windows, but the heroine ignores them. The inability to go beyond the windows symbolizes that the heroine’s personality must abandon to be accepted by the community (Salayo and Macam 46). She was unwilling to see other women, as they resembled the main character’s life, which she did not want to follow. They may be seriously discriminated against if they express their opinions directly. The author conducts a game of symbols and their interpretation in our minds. Readers are accustomed to associating windows with gates through which you can get out and be free. In this work, windows are blocks because the society of that time did not allow the heroine to climb over the bars of the windows to gain freedom. If the heroine manages to escape, society may not accept her, and she may still be asked to hide behind these windows.
Based on the notation with signatures, it can be assumed that Gilman used such symbols to show how women were severely restricted in the 19th century. The characters are directly related to each other, with a strong meaning for each of them. The author did offer several basic ideas, including the equality of women and men in society and her call for the end of a male-dominated society. In general, The Yellow Wallpaper can be proven a feminist text that opposes culture in the 19th century.
Works Cited
Roethle, Christopher. “A Healthy Play of Mind: Art and the Brain in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.” American Literary Realism, vol. 52 no. 2, 2020, pp. 147-166.
Salayo, Juland, and April Macam. “From Fancy to Feminist Frenzy Fight: An Ideational Grammatical Metaphor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Translation Studies, vol. 5 no. 2, 2020, pp. 39-64.