After analyzing the story, it could easily be said that the author was trying to portray the struggle of domination between men and women. In a sense the narrator eventually escapes her husband’s control but at the cost of her own sanity. I feel that Gilman’s story can be taken in its most literal sense as the battle between male and female, but to dig deeper, why couldn’t we say that the story shows a general struggle over the control of our own lives?

The general population is brought up by some authority that tells us what is right and wrong, and as we grow older we slowly become more independent. As we move away from whomever or whatever has raised us, we begin to savor our sovereignty, but als

The wallpaper is symbolic of the state of mind of the narrator. The room where the narrator has to spend her time is symbolic of the conditions that eventually make her lose her mind, and the most dominant feature in the room is the yellow wallpaper with its “torturing” pattern. The woman is eventually forced into a prison within her own mind. The wallpaper represents this prison.

Through looking at the symbolism of the wallpaper we see that it can be read as representing the patriarchal society prevalent at that time, and also as a representation of the narrator’s mental state, and how it changes throughout the course of the text. These images portray people in general to be less weak than they are sometimes thought to be. The narrator manages to escape her husband’s control, albeit through a descent into madness. If we are to escape control in our lives do we have to go mad?

The woman’s husband treats her like a child. He says to her, “What is it little girl?” “Don’t go walking about like that, you’ll get cold.” I think that Gilman intentionally made the room

Some topics in this essay:
Perkins Gilman, , yellow wallpaper, escape husband’s, husband’s control, narrator’s mental,