The Yellow Wallpaper

Joshua Ramseur

Mr. Frye

Honors English 3

February 3, 2014

The Yellow Wallpaper

            Throughout the Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives us the readers multiple examples of symbolism. The biggest one obviously being the wallpaper has many different ways of showing symbolism as the story progresses. Between the pattern of the wallpaper, the scent, and the tidiness of it, the narrator goes insane. The narrator becomes outspoken and which at the time also meant that she became crazy. This short story was written to let society see the world from a woman’s point of view and was one of the earliest literary works to show and stand up for women’s rights.

            At the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman kicks the story off by writing through the wife. This allows the readers to be in the mind of the narrator. By us readers having this power I believe it also affected our viewpoint on the narrator state of mind. The wife did not start showing signs of insanity until she said that the wallpaper moved. She claims that the wallpapers patterns are moving and she was determined to figure out why. Eventually she thinks she figures out why the patterns move. She thinks that a woman is trapped inside the wallpaper. This symbolizes her life as over the last couple of months. She is moved from her home to a house away from the city and is isolated from all of her social life. The wife is trapped in her room similar to the woman being trapped inside of the yellow wallpaper.

Another symbol Gilman writes is how the narrator begins to tear the wallpaper away from the wall. The narrator feels like a woman is behind the wallpaper and that she is in need to be freed. By the wife tearing down the wallpaper, she felt like this was helping the imaginary woman to become free. This relates back to how the narrators husband taking things from his wife such as a social life and her ability to express herself through writing. The Yellow Wallpaper slowly but surely began to take over the woman’s life to the point that all she did was obsess over the wallpaper that was in her room at her new house.           

Lastly, Gilman also said that the wallpaper had a unique scent to it. A scent so strong that it followed the narrator everywhere she went. The narrator claimed that she could even smell that unique smell in her own hair. The woman hugged and even tasted the wallpaper while she was stuck in her room. By the wallpaper having a scent, Gilman was showing us that this woman really was now obsessed with the wallpaper and spent all of the time thinking and analyzing it. This symbolizes how the woman was unable to leave her room and could not escape from it.        

In conclusion, Gilman did a great job using the situation of an insane woman to express her beliefs and feelings toward women’s rights at the time. Her use of symbols allowed her to get her point across clearly. All of her symbols were important and meant a lot to the story