Symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

Crawl Behind the Wallpaper

Swiftly, surely, smoothly, she crawled around the perimeter of the room, the horrid yellow paper peeling slowly in patches all over the airy room, the chained walls shaken but unbroken mocking the women as they crawl, crawl so desperately. Why do they crawl so frantically as if an invisible force compels them to? In Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman isolated from society and work slowly spirals into insanity with her obsession over that horrid, horrid, yetever so intriguing yellow wallpaper. The blatant symbol of the yellow wallpaper and her drive into madness enforces the theme that confinement and suppression, especially for women in the home, can drive even an emotionally stable person into the corners of darkness.

The narrator prescribed the rest cure for temporary nervous depression slight hysterical tendencies but thats no particular concern by her loving physician of a husband is forced into an airy room brimming over with gleaming winking sunlight and glaring barred windows with a lonely bed ironed and grilled into the floor. But the most striking feature of this splendid little prison is the walls stripped into patches, papered in sections, a hideous glaring flamboyant sprawling yellow paper. So repulsive, irritating, and utterly confusing and formless that it provokes no demands a closer study. And study she did, the narrator with nothing better to do spent days looking and tracing the pattern, looking desperately for a connection, a link, something concrete behind its organization anything to stimulate her brain. As her obsession grows with finding something with the wallpaper, she begins to see a ghostly pattern behind the horrendous wallpaper with the strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths. As days pass, the form took shape into a desperate woman always crawling and shaking looking for any form of escape from the cage of the wallpaper. The narrators deranged mind begins to see the wallpaper filled with heads of women strangled between the bars as they try to escape. As she spirals down more and more, the narrator resolves to free these women by tearing off the wallpaper, sadly by this time she is beyond help for she has become the woman behind the wallpaper crawling, crawling amidst the paper calling for freedom yet never able to escape from the yellow wallpaper.

Evidently, this yellow wallpaper that seems to consume the narrator symbolizes the rigidity of society and tradition. It is literally a prison that holds back the women behind the wallpaper as they try to escape and it is figuratively the jail that holds the narrator prisoner. The narrator's feels a sense of being watched by the wallpaper which accentuates the idea of a prison. It emphasizes the theme of how confinement and forced submission for women into the domestic life can drive any person insane. The wallpaper is a condensed version of all of society. It wallpaper traps the narrator as she comes to identify with, and later become, the woman in the wallpaper. Her own identity is stripped away by society and is forced to bend to what society wishes the perfect woman to be. It acts as a domestic sphere that society had been trying to stuff women, regardless if they fit, into. The wallpaper that traps women and strangles them when they crawl about trying to find a way out is the same as the society that punishes women who wish to escape the domestic sphere and develop as a person with a distinct personality and identity. This mold that the wallpaper and society is trying to force the women living behind its bars to fit into (strangling off the parts that stick out) is what drives women like the narrator into wishing for escape from the prison. These women who see the bars and shake desperately at it trying to get out but cannot are the ones that sink into insanity.

The narrator, forever trapped by the yellow wallpaper, is doomed to crawl endlessly around and around the bright and airy nursery as the sun shines down mockingly past the barred windows and the stripped off yellow wallpaper at the lonely figure circling the parameter of the room. Insanity took over her mind because of the confinement that society has placed on women and their roles. Gilman craftily uses something as innocent as wallpaper and turns into the symbol of the domestic sphere that ruined and traps women into an endless cycle of mundane life.