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Yellow Wallpaper ( A critical essay)

In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows that a person can be manipulated into thinking that they are crazy and helpless when they really are the opposite. The man in the story, John, is her husband who is shown to be a doctor and tells his wife that he knows what is best for her. Ironically he is portrayed to be helping his wife and looking out for her, but what he is actually doing is trapping her in the room so she can’t get out. The wife, who has no name, was put into a room and was bed rested for the rest of the summer staying at this house. Furthermore, the woman, escapes out of her own sickness and realizes that John was keeping her trapped and she did nothing but obeyed John when he gave an order. The woman saw that this was happening to her through the woman that lived in the yellow wallpaper. In this essay, I am going to show how ironic it is that the woman, who has no name, rescued herself with no one else’s help, out of this state of being trapped by her husband.

The story begins in the summer in a colonial mansion which was a hereditary estate. They were only staying there until the lease was up. The woman starts out telling us that, “John is a physician, and perhaps-(I wo

The room that she is forced to stay in, “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with window that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore”. The woman loves the room and the view that it has, but is has hideous yellow wallpaper that she cannot stand. “Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed, which is all we found in the room, looks as if it has been through wars. But I don’t mind it a bit- only the paper”. This yellow wallpaper has really irritated her to the point that she has stared at it so much that she has made this yellow wallpaper come alive. The lady in the wallpaper symbolizes her and makes her see her own feelings in a supernatural way. In the day time she is free and can write; nobody comes to bother her. She is able to write whatever she wants in her journal. However at night, she feels trapped, like the lady that she has imagined in the wallpaper. At night, John is home and the bars on the window not only trap her but they trap the lady in the wallpaper. The bars on the window make a shadow in the wall which portrays the lady to be trapped. “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”. She “got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John was awake”. The woman is showing her feelings and her actions in this yellow wallpaper. She relates and symbolizes herself to the yellow wallpaper. Whatever may happen to her in her everyday life mentally ironically happens to the lady inside the wallpaper too.

At the end of the story, she finally was alone in the room at night and was able to help the lady in the wallpaper, who is her, escape and be free. As so

Some topics in this essay:
Perkins Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, yellow wallpaper, lady wallpaper, , bars window, freed lady, feels trapped lady, trapped lady, night john, lady trapped, feels trapped, story woman,