The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte P. Gilman, author of the “The Yellow Wallpaper”, was born on June 3, 1860, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. Gilman wrote the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1890 based off “his personal experience with a ‘rest cure’” (Wilson 279). After two years “The Yellow Wallpaper” finally got published in “1892 in the New England Magazine” to become a very popular and eye opening short story (Wilson 287). In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman reviles the oppression of women in the nineteenth century through characterization and setting.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in her journal about their rented summer estate that the family went to so they could attempt to overcome the narrator’s melancholy behavior. According to her family she needs a “rest cure” to feel well. Not being able to leave the room causes her to become obsessed with the horrid yellow wallpaper that coat’s the entire room. The only other person in the house is her husband, John. Him denying her freedoms, causes her to gradually becomes insane, and eventually ends up peeling off a majority of the wallpaper to find it’s “secrets”. The narrator becomes so nonsensical to the point where she locks herself in the room and denies access to her husband. When John finally breaks his way into the room he “faints” and the story ends when she says she must “creep over him every time” (Gilman 806). “The Yellow Wallpaper” went way deeper than just an entertaining short story. For example, it showed the relationship between husbands and their wives, the economic and social dependence of women on men, repression of female individuality, and it examined the role of women in the nineteenth-century American society,.
Gillman used a setting that helped promote an idea that women had very little power. The narrator got “nailed down” by her husband to live a lifestyle that she had no authority over (Allen 805). The narrator notices that “there are...