Chief Symbols In The Yellow Wallpaper
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Caitlin Ramsey
English 102
April 5, 2007
Chief Symbols in The Yellow Wallpaper
Gender roles play a significant part in The Yellow Wallpaper, represented heavily by the physical yellow wallpaper in the bedroom of the summer mansion. This story, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, even begins on the first page and throughout the entire story, the narrator portrays women in the common air of being dominated by men. Especially during this time, women were oppressed not only by their husbands but also by any male figure. For example, on page 28 she says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriagepersonally, I disagree with their ideasbut what is one supposed to do?” The results of what happens in The Yellow Wallpaper show plainly the results of most male to female oppression. It shows what will inevitably happen if women are oppressed by male figures throughout society. Before, the beliefs were that the woman of the house was expected to sit quietly and do only what the husband saw fit. The wallpaper particularly shows her oppression as well as self-expression through entrapment. Conrad Schumaker says, “that a woman is often seen as representing an imaginative view of things that mostly conflicts, though sometimes complements, the American males “common sense” approach to reality” (589-590). He says that Gilman answers the lifelong question of what happens to the imagination when it has to face a society that values the useful and practical, rejecting anything else as nonsense (590).
Throughout the story, the female narrator acknowledges that the house she is staying in for the summer is a beautiful one, with marvelous surroundings, however she says, “still I will declare that there is something queer about it” (29). She is battling oppression throughout the entire story, which she exhorts through being overly preoccupied and annoyed with the dull, faded yellow wallpaper which covers her bedroom that she must spend most of her time in. She is convinced that this wallpaper is moving, and that there is a woman trapped behind it that creeps around at night trying to find a way out. At the end she finally tears down the wallpaper when she feels that no one is stopping her anymore. Her husband, John, is out of town, and his sister who is also their maid, Jennie, is persuaded that she is no longer needed to be upstairs. This symbolizes her release from her oppression, and she will not even let John in the room anymore after she has freed herself. She says, “And Ive pulled off most of the paper, so you cant put me back!” (40).
Seeing as the narrator remains nameless throughout the entire story shows just how sheltered and tucked away that her life is. In the very first paragraphs of the story she states that John is overly practical and does not believe in faith, superstition, or anything he cannot see or feel, and when the narrator mentions them, he tells her that she is silly and wasting her time trying to figure out things that do not exist. John forbids the narrator to work or even write in her journal, thinking that working will over exert her, and writing is unnecessary. Because John is a doctor and she is convinced that she is sick, she thinks that she must believe everything he says and do everything he commands. He has inevitable eternal control over her actions, feelings, and thoughts. He based this “cure” on the works of Dr. Weir Mitchell, which calls for complete rest, coerced feeding and isolation. The sickness itself is the representation of the oppression she sees coming out in the wallpaper. The fact that she is “realizing” her sickness now is showing how she is beginning to realize just how suffocated and sheltered she is throughout her life. As an enhancement to this, the narrator sees herself as “a comparative burden,” as stated on page thirty-one. The narrator does not even speak of John as a husband, but more so a father figure saying, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly les me stir without special direction” (30). The equality that their marriage lacks is a vital part of any working relationship that is inevitably making her feel this oppression. She says “I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (29). However, since her husband is of such high social class with such a well-respected job, she says that she merely has a “temporary nervous depression…what is one to do?” She feels like she cannot escape her fate because he knows what he is talking about and she is just merely going along with what he says because she is ignorant to anything else.
The fact that she keeps saying the yellow wallpaper is moving, and the fact that it bothers her so terribly make a reader realize just how symbolic it is in the story. She is fixated on how repulsive the “smoldering unclean yellow” color is, and frequently gets lost in the incomprehensible patterns of the wallpaper (30). She even states that John laughs at her about the wallpaper on page three. Every time she brings up something she does not like, such as the yellow wallpaper, he makes her see her objection as foolish, and “just a whim” that can easily be ignored and solved. Even when she tries to tell him that she is not affected by her physical condition, but rather that it is mental, he begs her for the sake of the family to “never let that idea enter her mind” (35). The fact that she repeatedly says how she wants to tear down the wallpaper because it bothers her so alludes to how she wants to tear down the walls in the life that her husband has set up for her against her will. She mentally deconstructs the wallpaper until the very end of the story when she finally locks herself in and tears it down physically, every part she can possibly reach. She tears it down so that no one could possibly be entrapped or held there again. At the end of the story John faints after not being able to get in the room and stop the narrator from tearing down these walls, and after she unlocks the room for a final release, she steps over his lifeless body as though he does not even exist, once and for all saying that he can no longer stop her lifes voyage.
Female writers in the “so-called feminine fifties” wrote about such oppression throughout