The Yellow Wallpaper Setting Analysis

Words: 2096
Pages: 9

In Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the setting is the most important element in showing her reader the unfair societal norms that existed towards women in her time period. Gilman does this by using her own time for the setting of the story to make her message applicable for her early day readers, through the physical aspect of time and place allowing the reader to understand the entrapment and confinement that women felt from a physical level, and lastly she draws on setting to underly the outcome and the understanding of the message as it grows throughout the entirety of the story. Firstly, Gilman appealed to the reader's understanding of the time in which the story was set in. She used the late 1800's as the setting for her story, …show more content…
To begin, the setting makes the story realistic and relatable. In doing this Gilman hopes that it will allow for her readers to actually see themselves as potential characters and actually take her message to heart, rather than dismissing it due to unbelievability. One can see and example of this when the narrator describes the type of house they are going to be living in. Readers can see that the house was in need of repairs, and that it had been previously lived in. This paints the narrator as somebody normal, and a women a lot of people could relate to. By setting story in the same time and place that Gilman herself lived in, and when events like these happened to her it allows other women and maybe even men to understand the issues with society and their views on women. It also allows her to put forward a clear message of the possibility of freedom women could indeed strive for and potentially obtain. Not only does the setting make the story relatable, it also allows for the readers to sympathize with the narrator. Throughout the narrator's imprisonment in the house one can see that she is not happy, and she is being oppressed albeit accidentally. Gilman set the story to be in a house that the narrator first describes as "haunted" (Gilman 392), a house that seems more like a prison than a dwelling place. Gilman sets her story up this way because she desires for her readers to sympathize with the innocent side of her narrator and see her as a victim of society, and of misjudgment. One last importance of the setting to Gilman's message, was that it allowed for the overall understanding of where women stood in terms of achieving their freedom. Gilman has the narrator escape from the wallpaper, only to have her husband John faint when he sees her creeping around the