Woman In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Woman in the Wallpaper The short story “The Yellow-Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman suffering from a serious mental illness, but her husband John continues to think that she is not even sick and she is only suffering from a temporary nervous depression and some hysterical tendencies. Charlotte Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper in the story as a way to convey her feelings and mental state of mind in relation to her relationship with John. John and his wife move into a really old house and John chooses the attic room for the both of them to sleep in, but his wife despises the wallpaper saying “The color is repellent, almost revolting” (Gilman 649). Since she is sickly John keeps her alone in the room by herself, …show more content…
It becomes apparent when she says “And it is like a woman stooping down .and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit...I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move” (Gilman 652). To her the wallpaper appear to house a woman living within it, she then realizes that the wallpaper could actually be a prison for the woman when she says “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be”(Gilman 653). The woman in the wallpaper is her and the bars that keep her locked away in the wallpaper is John, because she is always being kept away from the outside world by John and her mind is using the yellow wallpaper to convey this message. Her morbid obsession of the wallpaper escalates when she says “" I've got out at last," said I, " in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back! " Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time! “ (Gilman 636), she ripped off the wallpaper the free the woman in it, but she is referring that the woman she freed from the wallpaper was her and when John saw that his wife was insane he fainted, which also symbolizes her cage collapsing, like the