2 pg Literary Analysis The Yellow Wallpaper

Chinyere Evulukwu
Period 3
Ap English III
November 17, 2008
Analysis of the Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an intimidating story about a woman who is obsessed with this wallpaper. She is married to a man named John who is also her Doctor, who she doesn’t state mistreat her but at the end proves to be the problem why she is obsessed with this so called Yellow Wallpaper. At first it is not really a problem. But as the narrator proceeds throughout the story, it becomes an obsession to her. Her obsession grows. She then starts to think that she sees a woman who is trying to get out from the main pattern. She sees her shaking the bars at night and creeping around during the day, when the woman is able to escape briefly. At the end of this story, the narrator is intense insane, but fails to realize that she is the trapped woman in the pattern. When John breaks into the room, and sees what she had done, he then faints so that the narrator has to creep over him every time. The narrator also mentions John’s sister, Jennie who is supposed to be a nurse to the narrator. As far as analyzing the story, there are a lot of things you can pick to analyze in this story. The author makes it clear of her problem which includes some of the symbols in this story.
One of the symbols in this story is the Yellow Wallpaper. The yellow wall paper symbolizes something that affects her directly, because it is a text that to her must be interpreted. At first the wallpaper as she states is “ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The worst part about it is the formless pattern which kind of fascinates her as she attempts to figure out how the pattern is organized. Eventually, after staring at the wall paper for a while, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. Also later on, sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees a cage with the head of many women all of whom were strangled when they tried to escape. This symbolizes most of the women in that century. Gilman uses this symbolism to show a symbol of the domestic life that traps so many people.