The Yellow Wallpaper Literary Response

The yellow wallpaper is a literary work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman that shows how easily a woman with depression can spiral into madness. But what caused her decent into the mental unstable corners of her mind? Why does she feel the need to tell her story? Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the description and symbolism of the wallpaper to show how marriage can become a cage to a woman if the marriage is more dominated by the male.

In the beginning of the story, Gilman is kind of casual in explaining her frustrations with her husband John. She talks about John quite a bit and what his attitude is like but she kind of brushes it off as though she is trying not to let it get to her. She says, "You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?" (Gilman). This obviously bothers her, yet she knows realistically there is nothing she can do about the fact that he does not believe her. She knows that what he says goes and that is the end of it. In the first couple of pages, the reader gets a feel for John and Charlotte's marriage. She says that she is "forbidden to 'work' until I am well again" (Gilman). Later on she says that if she would simply be allowed to work she would be more likely to recover. But of course, John has said she can not do this, and so here one can really feel tension building. As the pages go on, there are more decisions that John has made to his preference with out listening to her opinion; he decides which room they will stay in. When she explains the room she lets on more to her frustration with John and his decisions, but in the end she blows over them like earlier. By the end of the first section, we as readers can tell that the marriage is unbalanced and this will most likely cause problems later on in the story.

The really unnerving part of the story is the description and characteristics Charlotte gives to the wallpaper. At first, she absolutely hates the wallpaper, however as the story goes on she hates it less and less. When she first tells about the sub-pattern, she is only slightly irritated by the wallpaper. She says, "But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and sonspicuous front design" (Gilman). This line here sends chills up the reader's spine. She does not go into a lot of detail on the sub-pattern just yet, but that is what makes this line creepy. As readers, we do not understand what exactly she is seeing, but the fact that she is seeing some pattern behind the pattern marks where her quick decent into insanity begins. However, I found it interesting that the "crazier" she got, (crazy being how society would label a person in her state) the more she realized about herself. In this way, the wallpaper served as a symbol. In the first days of viewing the paper she hated it, but she saw nothing behind the pattern, at first. Then, as the days went on she could see deeper and deeper into the wallpaper. What I mean is, as the days went on she could see more of this woman behind the paper and understand better what she wanted. At first she could only barely see the woman, and at this point I believe she blinded to the situation she was in. Like the barely existing woman, she barely understood and realized how wrong and how messed up her marriage was. Then she began to see the woman in behind bars and trying to escape, and when she began to see the woman like this is when she started to realize how trapped she was. Finally she can not take it anymore, she feels the woman's pain because it is her pain and the destroys the paper in a frenzied attempt to let the woman free because that is what she wants, she wants to be freed from her cage. The woman behind the paper represents the narrator, and yes she did kind of lose it at the end, but I do not know if I would call her crazy, I think for the first time she was simply seeing clearly and everything built up and let loose. Really, the "crazier" the narrator got, the better she understood herself, and the clearer the woman in the wall paper became, because she is the woman in the wall. This large symbol goes back and shows how marriage can become a cage, like the woman in the wall was literally in a cage, so was the narrator in her marriage.