Discussion Topic
Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Summary:
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper as a powerful symbol of the narrator's mental deterioration and societal oppression. The wallpaper reflects her psychological state, representing entrapment and confinement inflicted by her husband's control and societal norms. The narrator's fixation on the wallpaper parallels her struggle for intellectual and personal freedom, culminating in her identification with the trapped woman she perceives within it. The story critiques the oppressive "rest cure" treatment and highlights the importance of acknowledging women's voices and autonomy.
What symbolism is represented in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
The yellow wallpaper becomes symbolic of the narrator's mental state as she progresses through the story. At first, she loathes it, just as she loathes her confinement and tries to suppress her anger at her husband, John, who is responsible for it. She tries to understand the wallpaper's design and describes the paper in such a way as to give us a clue to her intelligence.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The wallpaper begins to provide intellectual stimulation that she otherwise lacks, and so she begins to fixate on it and to think that...
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she is growing fonder of her room and even more healthy, "because of the wallpaper." Eventually, she begins to imagine that a woman is trapped inside the wallpaper (as she, in many ways, is trapped within it), and she makes it her goal to free that woman.
Once she succeeds in tearing down the paper, thereby freeing the trapped woman, she loses all sense of her own identity and begins to think of herself as the now-freed woman who has come out of the wallpaper. Unable to obtain freedom for herself, she invents a fellow prisoner and then takes on her fictitious identity in order to obtain a kind of mental freedom. The wallpaper becomes the motif through which all this can transpire.
In terms of the meaning of the story, we see—through the narrator's experiences—the significant toll taken on a female patient when her concerns and ideas about her own health are not taken seriously. The narrator is not allowed to have any say in her own treatment, and her feelings are disregarded by her husband, her brother, and what seems to be the entire medical establishment; she is condescended to and infantilized rather than treated as an intelligent adult.
As a result, her mental health rapidly declines, and she ends up far more ill than she was to begin with. Therefore, one of the main themes of this text is that the ailments of female patients must be taken seriously and that their ideas should not be discounted when it comes to their treatment.
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The value in this short story is that it interprets Silas Weir Mitchell's rest cure treatment for postpartum depression and other "nervous" disorders from the point of view of a woman who was actually subjected to it.
Mitchell was a real person and his theories on dealing with patients suffering from what we would today call mental illness were widely influential in the real world at around the turn of the century and for some decades beyond. For example, Virginia Woolf was subjected to the rest cure treatment when she had nervous breakdowns.
Woolf critiques this form of treatment in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, when shell-shocked Septimus Smith commits suicide rather than be subjected to a rest cure in an institution. Gilman also critiques this treatment, which deprived patients of any intellectual outlets or interests, as a cruel punishment that only made any depression or mental illness worse.
Gilman shows the narrator disintegrating and becoming more profoundly mentally ill under this "cure" than she was before it started. Women's voices about what they need should be heard, not ignored by men trying to determine what is "best" for them without their input. Gilman's story is important because it provides a compelling and persuasive critique of the horror of mental health care in her period.
'The Yellow Wallpaper' is an important and valuable text in several ways. It deals with important issues - the treatment of women and mental illness in society, based upon Gilman's own experience of post-natal depression - and it does so in a striking manner, employing the style of psychological horror. Indeed, this approach led it initially to be regarded as little more than horror in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, but subsequently it has come to be recognised as a seminal social and feminist text in its depiction of a woman whose mental breakdown is worsened by the medical treatment foisted upon her by her male carers.
In the time in which the story was written, women were often diagnosed vaguely with hysteria and condemned to a rest-cure which, as Gilman knew from her own experiences, often worsened the problem. Confined to her bed, forbidden to do anything so taxing as writing - something she herself realises would be therapeutic for her - the narrator almost literally goes out of her mind with boredom.
As this character narrates her own story, she is able to directly communicate her thoughts and feelings to the reader, in a style that is at once monotonous and agitated. We, as readers, are able to sympathise directly with her, and that makes us more involved in the story and the issues that it raises.
The story also makes effective use of imagery with the yellow wallpaper which becomes a sinister symbol of the narrator's mental problems and her feeling of entrapment:
The colour is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
This grim description conveys the narrator's own sense of sickness, and even hellishness, with the reference to the 'sulphur tint'. With the use of such sophisticated literary techniques, the story leaves a lasting impression on the reader. It deals with important social issues in a memorable way and that is its enduring value.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" takes place in a colonial mansion in the countryside. The narrator describes it as beautiful but isolated. Thus, she states,
it is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.
This detail is important, given just how critical the theme of isolation is within the story, with its main character, who is already depressed, finding herself further isolated within the house. However, even within the isolation of the house, it is important to note that most of the story is set within an even more confined space: the nursery, which contains the yellow wallpaper that the main character both detests and fixates on.
These details of physical setting are critical in shaping the themes and plot of the story, given its deeply psychological undertones (undertones that are tied closely with its feminist criticisms). One can observe a sense of chauvinism in the husband's treatment of his wife. He neither listens to nor respects her own subjective experiences concerning her own psychological state; he confines her to this house, appealing to his medical expertise when stating that it is for her own good. Thus, while the husband spends much of his time at his profession as a doctor, his wife finds herself stewing in her isolation and depression, deteriorating further and further over time. With that in mind, this sense of physical space (represented within the house and the room) is a critical component to the story, given these themes of isolation and confinement and their effect on one's psychological state.
Interestingly, the unnamed narrator of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallppaper" begins her narrative with this description of the house that is her medical retreat,
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house....
Further, she describes,
It is quite alone, quite three miles from the village, standing well back from the road, ...there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for gardeners and people.
Clearly, the setting holds much significance as it indicates the isolation to which the woman will soon be subjected, as well as a sense of imprisonment. The narrator herself is prescient as she feels "something strange" about the place in addition to her dislike for her room. She prefers one downstairs that has lovely chintz curtains with roses all over the window and a door that opens onto the piazza; however, her husband John confines her to an upstairs room that has bars on the windows and a "repellent" and "smouldering unclean yellow" wallpaper which she claims is the worst she has ever seen. It is, she observes ,
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin....[It] commit[s] every artistic sin....
At first repulsed aesthetically by the design and color of the wallpaper, the unnerved narrator, left to "rest" by herself, finds little else to focus upon than this paper that is hideous to her. And, with the narrator's internalizations upon her mental and physical state, she begins significantly to project her inner feelings onto the paper. In an eerie foreshadowing of the final crisis, the narrator describes the paper with continuing prescience,
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
This hideous paper becomes for the narrator symbolic as she envisions a woman who, like herself, must hide and creep behind the "patterns" of the Victorian femme covert laws that suppress wives. In her effort to free herself from her repression and depression, the narrator tries to free the envisioned woman who is in need of rescue. But, in this effort, the narrator sacrifices her own identity. For, while she has unraveled the pattern of her life in unraveling the paper, she has sacrificed her own personal identity. For, after her husband retrieves the key and opens the room, he sees his wife continuing her "creeping" on the floor:
"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, the narrator perceives herself as the woman trapped behind the paper
and her former being is "Jane." As in her prescient remark, the woman has
committed a suicide of her personality [Jane, which is her name] "plunging
off at outrageous angles," and
destroyed her own identity in the "unheard of contradiction" of becoming the
woman freed from the repressive patterns of Victorian womanhood.
The yellow wallpaper is, indeed, significant in the narrator's journey from repression to independence. But, the cost has been "uncertain" and "at outrageous angles," so much so that the narrator is disassociated from her true self in a suicide of her mind that leaves her, like the house, "quite alone" and in "a separate house" from her husband and others.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed woman narrating the short story is virtually a prisoner in a small yellow room with horrendous yellow wallpaper. She is staying at this small summer house with her husband, newborn baby, and sister in an attempt to get some rest and recouperate from her post-partum depression. She is not allowed to see her baby, read, write, or do anything that may strain her, so out of boredom, she resorts to studying the hideous yellow wallpaper.
After weeks of meticulous observation, she starts to see eyes peering our from the paper, staring at her. She believes that the paper knows her better than anyone else. Finally, she sees the form of a woman hiding in the pattern. The narrator notices that the pattern is double, bars in front and an intricate display behind. The woman is behind the bars and is shaking them, trying to get out. Full of empathy, the narrator locks herself in the room and desperately tries to get the woman out by ripping the paper.
Because the woman in the yellow paper is trapped and alone, she symbolizes the narrator in her incarceration. Both women are trying to escape their "jail" unsuccessfully. The woman in the wallpaper is behind bars, unable to be heard. The narrator's prison is both physical and intellectual, as her husband controls her actions and words. He undermines her in every way and trivializes her fears and desires.
If one employs the one denotation of haunt, to intrude upon continually as an idea "haunts" a person's mind, then readers may certainly perceive the narrator of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as haunted by the sickening yellow paper on the walls of her confinement, a wallpaper that seems to take on expression and give perverse form to itself in its asymmetry.
This wallpaper, in its haunting presence for Gilman's narrator, seems "a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that sill and conspicuous front design." To the narrator, therefore, the figure that she perceives--whether it be real or in her mind--assumes the characteristics of a veritable ghost as it becomes
like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here!
I am sure other editors might disagree with me but I don't actually think this story has much to do with "haunting" in the traditional oh-no-there's-a-ghost-behind-you kind of way. The principle theme of this incredible short story is one woman's account of her own mental condition and how this spirals down and down until she reaches a point of complete insanity. We need to be aware of the way in which the female narrator is unreliable, and we need to see how she projects her feelings of despair, entrapment and anger in the curious yellow wallpaper in her room.
Note how as the narrative progresses she sees a woman in the wallpaper, who moves around and "shakes" the bars of the yellow wallpaper:
The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
...Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
What we come to realise is that this woman that she sees in the wallpaper is her own intellectual and emotional self that is "trapped" and "encaged." Although her husband means well and is following the orders of the doctor, she is not allowed to escape or to express herself, and thus she eventually gives in to insanity.
Thus whilst there is a supernatural presence in the wallpaper, we can identify that it represents the anger and rage of the narrator who is forced to lie in silence on a bed in this room, imprisoned and encaged just as surely as the woman that she sees raging so strongly against her captivity.
In 1913 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published, "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" explaining that she herself had suffered for years from nervous problems that led to melancholia. After she had suffered for three years, she went to a noted specialist in nervous diseases who prescribed the "rest cure." Since she was physically healthy, her body responded to the rest and she was sent home with instructions to "live as domestic a life as possible" and to only have two hours of "intelligent life" a day.
Ms. Gilman embraced the new feminist movement that supported more independence and broader roles outside the home, roles that could exercise a woman's spirit and give her increased, not less "iintelligent life." Very avant-garde, Mis Gilman believed that women should be financially independent from men; she even promoted the idea that men and women should share domestic work--a most radical concept for the late 1800s. Her story, a testimony to her beliefs, caused some social furor at the time that it was published.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is quite reflective of the time in which it was written. The protagonist is cloistered in a room that she abhors. She longs to go outside, yet she is forced to remain inside because of her suppossed declining health. There is evidence in the story that it is her imprisonment that causes her sickness, though her husband does not allow her to see it. These details paint a picture all too common of the era that Gilman lived in - women who were expected to answer to their husbands, regardless of how intelligent or unhappy they may be. This story helped to pull the veil back on this kind of treatment toward women.
The primary symbol in the story is, unsurprisingly, the wallpaper itself. The wallpaper starts out in the story as something slightly off or irksomely unappealing. It is perhaps due to this aspect of it that the narrator, already in a seemingly fragile mental state, fixates on it in her isolation and thinks of it as something that she must unravel and understand.
The pattern of the wallpaper is formless. Hour after hour, she puzzles over it, until she begins to see an illusory second pattern in the negative space—a pattern that she eventually recognizes as a woman that seems desperate to escape.
This is the true nature of the symbolism of the wallpaper. It represents the prison of family, societal conditioning, and culture that imprisons women who deviate from the norm even slightly. The prison has no concern for the narrator's actual well-being, only how suited she is for public appearance. It is because of this, perhaps, that the narrator feels compelled to tear it apart.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolism permeates the atmosphere, setting, and even the mood of the main character, mainly due to the fact that the woman has no other option but to transfer her disparate thoughts and emotions onto objects. This is, perhaps, the only way that she can make sense of her current situation.
It is arguable that the first symbol that we see is the isolated estate to which she is taken. A big house separated from the rest of civilization, basically, is symbolic of how her own issue, as big as it is, has been just removed to a separate place- but has not been resolved.
The central symbol, which is the yellow wallpaper, is described under a very negative light
it is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
Here we already see the first signs of how the woman personifies the patterns on the paper in a way that reflects her own state of mind. Words such as "uncertain", "destroy", "suicide", "contradictions", are present in her subconscious, and the paper is slowly leading her to open up to her true emotions.
Then, there is the color. Although the actual color yellow may or may not have a specific meaning, we could argue that in different types of literature it has meant different things. We could say that it is the color of cowardice, or the color of the "cheap" (as in the 1890's coined term "yellow press", or "dime a dozen"). One thing is for sure: the paper is ugly. It makes her feel oppressed that this is what is important about it.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
Here we see more words: sulphur (related to the smell of evil), "revolting", "unclean" and, most importantly, "dull". Such are her emotions regarding the paper which, again, is nothing but a transference of emotions from her mind onto objects.
The slow progression of her depression will end up in her tearing up the yellow wallpaper in order to liberate the woman who she believes is trapped behind. Obviously, this is another clear reference to her own situation, where she has been removed from a comfort zone and placed in what is nothing short of an experimental room; all in aims to calm her nerves after giving birth. Hence, the paper is the biggest symbolism in the story because it literally mirrors her state of mind.
I am sure I am not alone in finding the ending of this excellent tale to be rather disturbing in the way it represents a compelete abandonment to the madness and lunacy that we see the narrator has been sliding towards throughout the story. The way that the narrator explicitly identifies herself as the woman that she has seen trapped behind the "bars" of the yellow wallpaper is made clear by her action of circling the room, following the wallpaper round and round. She, just like the woman she has seen behind the wallpaper, is trapped inside the endless maze of her own lunacy, and even the presence of her husband's body in the way of her course does not impede her movements. Note what she says to her husband and how she responds to his fainting:
"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!
The narrator's lack of self-awareness and empathy is shown by her questioning why her husband should have fainted. What to her makes perfect sense is only greeted by horror and stunned amazement by her husband as he faints. The move of the narrator from being sane to insane is complete, and is marked by the narrator becoming the woman behind the wallpaper that she has imagined throughout the story.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a classic gothic horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and mainly concerns the slow progress of mental illness.
The protagonist, who is never named, is suffering from post-partum depression upon the birth of a child, and is prescribed strict best-rest by a doctor. In the setting, this is considered completely reasonable, and she is prohibited from any activity, even non-strenuous ones such as reading. With no other mental stimulation, she creates a trapped woman in the yellow wallpaper, eventually trapping herself in madness.
The yellow wallpaper is significant because yellow is often considered the color of sickness or malaise. Ancient medicine colored the "humors" of the body; the Choleric humor was yellow bile, representing fire, or a creative, passionate, unstable mentality. The protagonist is certainly unstable, and her creativity shows in her belief that the wallpaper hides a trapped woman (which is itself an unsubtle echo of her own imprisonment). She mentions the "smell" of yellow pervading the house, which brings to mind mold or mildew, which in an unventilated home could cause a fungal infection; even the thought of a "yellow smell" is repugnant. Finally, the symbolic association of cowardice with the color yellow could be a condemnation of the woman's refusal to fight against the oppressive patriarchal society which has imprisoned her, instead becoming "yellow" and retreating into madness and submission.
How does the description of the wallpaper change over time in The Yellow Wallpaper?
"The Yellow Wallpaper" details, in first-person voice, the gradual mental deterioration of a young woman, and its description of the wallpaper itself mirrors her worsening mental state. Even so, if we look across the entire span of the short story, from beginning to end, we'll find a near continuous fixation on that piece of wallpaper (though the nature of that fixation will evolve over time).
The topic of the wallpaper comes up from the very earliest journal entries as a critical theme in her account. She voices a detestation of the wallpaper, and even in that very first journal entry, she puts significant effort into describing it. She speaks about its color (which she finds odious), as well as its shape and pattern, noting that:
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
From the very beginning, this wallpaper exerts a hold on her imagination, but in those early entries, it's not entirely all-consuming. She writes about her day, her complaints and frustrations, her interactions with her husband, and while the wallpaper is a critical component in those recollections, it does not dominate the entries as it will later. Eventually, there will be entire entries where the wallpaper is all that she seems to think about (the wallpaper and/or the woman associated with it). Thus, as the story proceeds, we see a growing obsession with and fixation on the wallpaper, alongside her conviction that there is a woman on the other side of it. Thus, these descriptions of the wallpaper (and the degree to which they dominate these entries) will mirror her own deteriorating mental state.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," how does the wallpaper evolve as a symbol?
At first, the narrator seems to view the wallpaper as a symbol of her own restrictions and confinement in the room, even if unconsciously. She seems to want to trust her husband, but "he does not believe [she is] sick!" Further, he has "assure[d] friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with [her] but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency [...]." He wants her to ignore the wallpaper, but she "get[s] unreasonably angry with [him] sometimes." Likewise, she gets angry at the paper, too. She says,
There is a recurrent spot where the. pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.
Unable to express her anger at her husband's confinement of her, as well as the social restrictions he places on her and his insistence that she rest completely and never work, the narrator expresses her anger at the wallpaper instead. She goes on,
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.
The narrator's emotional state deteriorates, and we get clues that she really is physically confined here, and against her will. For example, she says that the windows are barred and there's a gate at the stairs that keeps her from going up and down at will. She begins to notice a change in her feelings, saying, "I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper." It, at least, gives her something to focus on, some mental stimulation, unlike her husband who will allow her nothing. She studies it because it gives her something to do. To this end, she says,
I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of [...]. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase. The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
She is a clearly very intelligent woman who needs something to think about. John won't let her go to visit friends and family, and he insists that she make up her mind to "keep well" because only she can. When he insists that she trust him, she just goes back to pondering the wallpaper. In the absence of any other mental food, the narrator continues to consider and describe it, even stating that John "is so pleased to see [her] improve!" Now she feels that she is getting better "because of the wall-paper." She says,
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
Now, she doesn't want to leave because she wants to "find it out," and she doesn't sleep because "it is so interesting to watch developments" in the paper. She begins to notice that there are two patterns—a front and a back—and a woman lives behind the front pattern, constantly "shak[ing] it." The narrator imagines that this woman is trapped in the paper (just as she is trapped in the room itself), and she begins to relate to this woman, empathizing with her and wanting to help to free her from her confinement. It is as though the narrator, unable to free herself, imagines another woman, a woman whom she can free. The wallpaper is still, then, a symbol of her imprisonment in this room, except we see the horrible change in her mental state through it. Instead of hating it, it has come to provide her a source of mental stimulation, and, eventually, it even becomes a way for her to work out her own fears and anxiety regarding her own confinement. Then, when she "frees" the woman from the paper by ripping it all down, she believes that she becomes the newly-freed woman: asking about the women she claims to see outside, she says, "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" She insists to John that he cannot put her back in the paper. Ironically, the narrator now believes herself to be free (what she'd wanted all along), though she will actually probably require further confinement as a result of her complete mental breakdown. Moreover, the treatment meant to "cure" her actually made her much, much worse. In the end, then, the wallpaper has become both a symbol of her confinement and her fantasized freedom.
In literature yellow is symbolic of evil. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" there is, of course, ambiguity about the source of the "evil" as the reader is uncertain whether the main character is, indeed, overwrought or whether her husband tries to convince her that she is ill.
The confining room, much like the confinements of the woman's society, produces the evil as the woman is forced to be captive to either her husband's demands or to the conflicts within her. She struggles to tear away the wallpaper, to break free of the confinements of either her own mind or the suppression of the male-dominated society.
Eventually, she becomes obsessed by the symbol of her terrible confinement and is reduced to insanity.
The pattern of the yellow wallpaper is symbolic of the narrator's deteriorating mental state as she is locked up in the room for "treatment." The wallpaper has a horribly busy, ugly pattern, and as time passes, the narrator's mind slowly becomes busier with her obsession of the wallpaper. The wallpaper is also symbolic of the isolation she is subjected to. The narrator eventually ends up tearing down the wallpaper, which, in her own mind, frees her from her obsession. However, she has descended into madness after doing so.
The wallpaper evolves as a symbol progressively through the story as the narrator becomes more and more obsessed with it and as her mental state deteriorates. The narrator writes about the wallpaper more and more in her journal until it is all she writes about.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from depression. The doctors at the time believed that complete bed rest and isolation from the rest of the world was the cure. After losing more than a year to this method, Ms. Perkins decided to join the world again. However, she said that she never fully recuperated from her isolation. After this experience, Ms. Perkins wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper."
The unnamed narrator begins the story as someone who really did not want to be where she was: out in the country, isolated, and alone most of the time.
Her husband, John, who is a doctor, has discussed her depression (Today, this would be called post-partum depression.) with other doctors. He believes that he is doing the best thing for his wife.
When her husband is at work, she is alone with the wallpaper. As the narrator sinks deeper into psychosis, the wallpaper evolves. Beginning with an annoyance of the pattern and color of the paper, the woman feels that the paper looks as though it wants to commit suicide. She is able to fool those who check on her. They seem to feel that she is improving.
This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck, and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
As the woman's obsession increases, she can think about nothing but the wallpaper:
They crawl with unblinking eye.There is a sub pattern. When the sun hits it just right, there is a formation of a figure.
She is almost fond of the room because of the wallpaper. She can think of nothing else. The figure behind the wallpaper begins to shake.
The wallpaper now has a fungus that infects everything. Then, it has a smell which permeates her skin and hair. She cannot take her eyes off the pattern and she refuses to go outside. The color is hideous with toadstools moving along connected. As she watches it, the formation becomes a woman. The woman comes out in the daytime.
Now, the narrator knows that she is not alone. She and the woman can peel off the paper together. No one can touch the paper. The narrator notices that the bed has been gnawed on.
She does not want John to come in, so she throws the key out the window. The woman ties herself up and then plans on tying up the other woman. The narrator is creeping around on the floor when her husband comes in and sees her. He passes out. She tells him that she has gotten free despite his and Jane's efforts.
There is a controversy about "Jane." Two possibilities arise: "Jane" is the character in the wallpaper that the narrator has given a name. Some critics believe that "Jane" is the name of the narrator, and she is referring to herself as in the third person. If "Jane" is the narrator, than the she has found liberation from sanity and has escaped into the regions of her own mind.
What are the symbolic meanings of yellow in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
To add to the relevant ideas above, generally, yellow in literature is the color of evil. Having been placed in the room by her cruel husband, perhaps the woman projects her husband's evil act into the wallpaper. Certainly, obsessive people often transfer their anxieties, insecurities, etc. onto insignificant things. For example, Lady Macbeth focuses her guilt onto the "damn spot" of blood that she cannot seem to clean from the stairs of the castle.
The color yellow can be used to symbolize many things depending on the context of the story. In the case of "The Yellow Wallpaper", you have to consider the treatment of the main character. She is treated as weak and sickly, which yellow is often used to symbolize. For instance, a sickly baby who is jaundiced is yellow and a cowardly person is often labeled as yellow. In this case, the protagonist is seen by both her husband and sister-in-law as weak, both mentally and physically. Thus, the choice of yellow is an appropriate symbol for the wallpaper that becomes her obsession. The wallpaper also has other characteristics that seem to represent the main character. It contains "pointless patterns" and "lame uncertain curves". These descriptions also point to a weak woman. Then the pattern takes off into "outrageous angles" and seems to destroy itself " in unheard of contradictions." Once again, the wallpaper mirrors the behavior of the woman, who is slowly going insane because she is not allowed to make any of her own decisions. As "Elaine R. Hedges wrote in the afterword to the 1973 edition of the story that "the paper symbolizes [the narrator's] situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself. How can she define herself?"
Various details in the setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” serve as symbols that represent patriarchy, marriage, domesticity, and female entrapment in those traditional worlds. The story takes place in “ancestral halls” at a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate,” where the narrator convalesces one summer. As the wife of a doctor and mother of a baby, the narrator is a young woman slowly going mad while growing obsessed with yellow wallpaper decorating the room in which she stays. The estate symbolizes the grandeur and power of the patriarchal structure of society and her marriage. She is fulfilling expected roles that are “ancestral,” or traditional. Her husband, John, is controlling and patronizing as he initially laughs at her, “but one expects that in marriage.” Isolated from others, the narrator has no contact with any other living being except her husband and her husband’s sister. Similarly, the mansion is “quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.”
Outside of the mansion are gardens. Symbolizing life and humanity, the outdoors is off-limits to the narrator. From one window, she sees
the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least.
The outside world is vibrancy, vitality, and freedom, all of which the narrator is denied; over the course of the story, she loses connection to other living people and reality. The greenhouses are “broken,” illustrating how even buildings within the estate that used to nurture plants are now devoid of and unable to sustain life.
Instead, the narrator is told to stay in a
big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playground and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
This large room—a nursery, playground, and gymnasium—symbolizes overwhelming domesticity and motherhood; she is expected to create a home and raise children. Trapped in this traditional role, she has no escape. The room becomes a dungeon with bars on the windows and “rings and things in the walls” for tethering prisoners.
The bed inside the room is large and “immovable … it is nailed down.” It symbolizes matrimony and the narrator’s sexual roles as a wife who satisfies her husband and a mother who procreates offspring. Controlled by her husband John, the narrator cannot escape from his “immovable” power or her “immovable” expected duties.
Within the room is the titular yellow wallpaper that consumes the narrator’s attention and sanity. Symbolic of illness, the yellow color reflects her supposedly poor health: she suffers from “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” as diagnosed by her physician husband. It appears in shades of “smouldering, unclean yellow,” “dull yet lurid orange,” and “sickly sulphur tint” in various places and under different lighting. The wallpaper’s disturbing design, which mirrors her precarious mental state, is
one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
Within the wallpaper, the narrator sees
a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
There’s sister on the stairs!
The juxtaposition of the figure and John’s sister seems to suggest that phantom in the wallpaper represents surveillance and her sister-in-law as a spy. Gradually, this figure comes to symbolize the narrator’s entrapment in her traditional roles. The figure is a “woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern”; she is trapped behind the pattern, which symbolizes the prison of domesticity.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!
At night, the narrator sees
A great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside-down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
In other words, women who try to escape from their traditional roles are chastised or ostracized by society. In fact, maybe “it would not be half so bad” to die (e.g., be strangled until their eyes turn white or be beheaded) in order to escape stultifying social expectations.
References
I think that one of the most powerful symbols in the story is the window that is in the narrator's room. The windows that "look all ways, and air and sunshine galore" are fundamentally different from the imprisoned condition that the narrator perceives. The window is a symbol of what can be, the freedom and the agency that might await her. The window is symbolic of what the narrator believes will help her in terms of walking, getting out of the house, and being able to be the agent of her own actions.
I think the contrasting symbol to this would have to be the wallpaper itself. The description that the narrator offers of the wallpaper brings out its symbolic condition:
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounce enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The "repellent" texture is symbolic of how the husband has taken away any joy and agency in the woman's life, reflecting a world far from a "beautiful place." The wallpaper is symbolic of a constructed world for the narrator, one where there is an absence of "society and stimulus." As a result, the narrator has focused all of her energy on the wallpaper and the designs that enable her to see "perseverance as well as hatred." The world that the narrator sees is not the world outside her window, but rather one within the wallpaper where "dim shapes get clearer every day." It is a symbol that represents the growing chasm between the narrator and reality. It is also a symbol of what happens when thinking energies are suppressed under simplistic notions of what's good. The wallpaper becomes the symbol that reminds the reader of how wrong "the medical profession" was in treating patients, and women, in particular.
References
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," how does the narrator's attitude towards the wallpaper change?
Early on, the narrator describes the paper as
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
At this stage, she obviously has strong negative feelings about the paper. She appears to be making a sort of study of it, saying that it does "provoke" her to do so. She is already attributing a kind of intention to it, especially in suggesting that the curves "commit suicide." It's quite an odd description of a wallpaper's pattern. She also uses words like "unclean" and "sickly" to describe the paper—words associated with disease.
Soon, however, the narrator does begin to personify the paper outright, saying,
This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had. There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
She now begins to suspect that the paper is trying to antagonize her, and she is growing more disturbed by the pattern. It makes her angry, and she cannot keep herself from obsessing over it, saying, "I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before." Not long after, the narrator goes beyond personifying the paper and begins to see a person within it:
This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
As her mental health deteriorates, the result of being shut up in this horrible room with no mental stimulation and very little company, the narrator's thoughts about the wallpaper become more and more fantastic and strange. Soon, the wallpaper even becomes less horrid to her; at the very least, she becomes ambivalent in her feelings. She says, "I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper." At night, she sees the "faint figure behind [the front design who] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out." The more trapped and confined the narrator feels, the more she begins to see this woman in the wallpaper. It becomes her personal mission to free this woman. It seems a sad playing-out of the fact that she is so disempowered herself that she dreams up a fictitious woman whom she can help to escape, when she cannot help herself. Soon, she is "quite sure it is a woman" trapped in the paper. The narrator even becomes possessive of the paper and jealous when anyone else looks at or touches it. She begins to believe that she is getting better and that "it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper"!
In the end, the narrator pulls all the paper down so that she can release the woman in it, and, eventually, she comes to believe that she actually IS the woman she's released from confinement in the wallpaper. She asks, regarding the other women she sees creeping in the garden, "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" In a horrific irony, the treatment that was supposed to cure her of what was likely postpartum depression actually caused her to have a mental break that resulted in the loss of her own identity. Trapped in a kind of prison, she imagines another woman whom she CAN save, and then she becomes this woman (in her mind) when her brain can no longer handle the facts of her own life.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story focused on the disintegration of the narrator's mind. The point of the story, which reflects the author's own experience, is that the so-called "cure", which involves isolating the mildly depressed and depriving them of all creative outlets, actually harms rather than helps them.
When we first encounter the wallpaper, the narrator describes it as aesthetically unappealing, but the description suggests a level of repulsion that reflects the narrator's own, somewhat unbalanced, state of mind. The color is described as "revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow" and the pattern as consisting of "lame uncertain curves" that "suddenly commit suicide". The attribution of suicide to inanimate wallpaper, however ugly, gives us a sense that the narrator is projecting her own mental state outward rather than simply observing the actual appearance of the room.
As the narrator descends further into insanity, she perceives the wallpaper as changing and moving rather than static. She then imagines a woman trapped in the wallpaper and feels that she must tear down the wallpaper in order to free the woman.
What symbolism contrasts the garden and the room in The Yellow Wallpaper? Why does the woman discard the key?
The garden represents freedom; in contrast, the room where she is confined represents her confinement, not only literally, but figuratively.
The garden is a beautiful place that is outside of the house, so this represents the freedom she could have. The room she is confined, too, though, is an ugly room, covered in horrible yellow wallpaper. The furniture is sparse and there are bars on the windows. This room is representative of her confinement, both physically and within her own mental illness. She cannot get better because the rest treatment is not working. It is making her mental state worse.
Also, the woman throws the key away because she has completely descended into madness. This could also be symbolic of all hope for recovery being lost. You might have heard the phrase "Lock them up and throw away the key." This phrase, usually used when we think about criminals in prison in some instances, means to never let that person out of prison, to let them languish and suffer their punishment. By throwing away the key, she is going to languish in her own mental illness, it appears, as it has only gotten worse over her time in the room.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," what are the narrator's feelings about her condition?
The narrator is torn between the cultural norms of the day, which dictate that she is suffering from hysteria and needs to be isolated for her own good, and her ingrained feeling that she is simply depressed and requires an emotional and creative outlet. She knows that there is something really wrong with her, but cannot express it or solve it by herself.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?
(Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," library.csi.cuny.edu)
Here the narrator's problem is seen; she asks the reader "what she can do" against her husband's accepted cultural diagnosis, but declares herself sick regardless. She thinks that she knows what she needs to get better, but cannot express that need to anyone, as it will be seen as a sign of her "hysteria." Instead, she tries to concentrate on the creation of a mental fantasy, which unfortunately becomes all-too real.
References
The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is in touch with the fact that she is slowly losing her mind. She admits that she is feeling better in "body," but her husband will not allow her to voice her opinion that she does not feel well mentally. Feeling isolated and not being allowed to socialize or have any "stimulation" of any kind only makes things worse for her. She knows that writing in her journal -- the means she has of expressing herself -- can be helpful for her condition, but she also has to sneak around in order to do so, and she finds this exhausting.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," how does the narrator's imaginative power evolve from seeing people in the garden to seeing a woman in the wallpaper?
The narrator's imaginative power in "The Yellow Wallpaper" arguably leads to her hallucinations at the end of the story.
In the passage in question from the early part of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed narrator describes the view from her window near the top of the house and references her husband's insistence that she not exert herself (her mind) in any way as she attempts to recover and rest. The passage reads,
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.
The narrator notices some features of the setting, like the bay and the wharf, but it's the lane with "people walking in these numerous paths and arbors" that captures her attention. She immediately undercuts her interest in the people by saying her husband/doctor has "cautioned [her] not to give way to fancy in the least." Though the narrator is a writer, she is advised not to exert her creative tendencies at all, as though that will intensify her illness. Her husband claims that her "imaginative power" will worsen her condition. Her capacity for "story-making," related to her writing, of course, is seen as too risky. The narrator confides that she will try to keep her imagination under control for the sake of her health.
It becomes clear over the course of the story that the narrator's creative powers need an outlet and that it is actually more dangerous for her to not exert her imaginative tendencies. Instead of channeling her "story-making" into a healthy product, it seems she starts to imagine women in the wallpaper, which, ironically, leads her to the perceptive insight that she is caged in this room and by the rest cure that limits her ability to write and express her thoughts and ideas productively.
Passages like this one help to prove that the rest cure is destructive to patients. "Nervous" women like Gilman's narrator need creative outlets. If they are not permitted to write, to socialize, or to go outside, they will end up devolving into madness. The solution isn't to stop all exertions of the patient's mind but to allow her to use her mind to help work through her trauma and anxiety.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," how does the narrator's mental state deteriorate?
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the protagonist travels with her husband to the country to recover from a nervous condition she is suffering from after the birth of their child.
Ironically, one might imagine that because the narrator is married to a physician, that she would be in the best of hands. This is, however, not the case. John, her husband, has taken it upon himself to see to his wife's treatment. Without any specialized training, he decides to put her in a room all alone at the top of the house. Because it was at one time a nursery, there are bars on the windows. In that the protagonist spends most of her time here and is not allowed to enjoy the company of others or to read or write, the room has become a virtual prison.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator is writing (which she must do in secret). She seems quite capable of understanding what she needs to feel better.
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is the one reason I do not get well faster.
(It is telling that she describes the paper as "dead." The reader can sense something is wrong.) The narrator's husband (who turns out to be a condescending boor) is so employed with feeding his ego that he refuses to consider that his wife has anything valuable to offer in her treatment. The socially accepted attitude that the man knows best is prevalent throughout the story. When John's wife tells him how awful the wallpaper is and how it upsets her, he decides he will not go out of his way to change anything in a rental property. It never occurs to him that a wife with a nervous condition might well benefit from soothing surroundings. If he had ever listened to her descriptions of the paper, he might have moved her as she requested:
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provide study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
We find out that John is not acting alone. The protagonist's brother is also a doctor. Neither man, it seems, has the slightest clue about what might be beneficial to their patient. She becomes obsessed with the paper: is it any wonder when she has nothing to do to occupy her mind?
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had.
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
Most of her time alone is spent studying the room. "She has minimal social interaction." She is constantly searching for refuge from the threat she feels from the wallpaper. At one point she describes furniture they once had—at a time when things were obviously not as bad as they are now. However, her memories imply that things have not been totally right even before now:
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
Her personification of the knobs and the chair show someone desperate for kindness and friendship, but then she goes on to note that if any of her other things seemed "fierce," she could be safe in that chair.
Then the woman sees a figure in the wallpaper.
But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
By now the reader understands that she is not getting better at all. The men in the story are all-knowing and overbearing. Even Jennie, John's sister, does not think to question the decisions of the men. In fact, the woman says that Jennie believes that writing has caused the deterioration of the woman's mind.
When the protagonist tries to approach her husband for help, he dismisses her. He tells her that she is getting better and that there is no need to leave the house early as his wife has asked. When she starts to disagree that only her body is better, he stops her with "a stern, reproachful look," as one might behave with a naughty child.
The woman is constantly weak. She cries all the time. She obsesses about the pattern of the wallpaper and then, she notices that it has a smell that pervades the house. She notes that she had thought of burning down the house to remove the smell. She does not sleep much at night anymore, but during the day. She is too busy to sleep after dark, for this is when the most interesting things happen in the wallpaper. She no longer wants to leave the house. With the passage of time, she has become engulfed by her delusions.
Eventually she makes a discovery. There is a woman behind the pattern in the wallpaper! In fact, sometimes she thinks there are many women behind the paper, all trying to get out! In her mind, the women are as trapped as she is. She describes the woman behind the paper:
And she is all the time trying to climb through.
The protagonist begins to see the trapped woman everywhere: in the yard, on the road..."creeping by daylight." She no longer trusts John. She suspects that he and Jennie are also interested in the paper. By the last day of her stay in the house, the narrator and the wallpaper woman have been working together to peel the wallpaper off so as to release the prisoner, when in fact the prisoner is the narrator.
When John comes to collect his wife, he struggles to open the door. When he finally gains access he cannot believe what he sees: his wife is creeping all along the walls. She triumphantly declares that she escaped and beat him and Jennie, and they can no longer put her back behind the paper. The physician is totally taken aback, confronted by a scene he cannot comprehend. He promptly faints, to his wife's surprise. But as he rests on the floor in her path, she continues "to creep over him every time!"
As an important note, this story is semi-autobiographical as the author...
...describes the treatment of women during a rest cure prescribed for nervous disorders by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who was a famous physician. The story describes the submissive, childlike obedience of women to male authority figures that was considered typical at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Gilman's writing effectively conveys the sense of the woman's disorientation and separation from reality over the three-month period she and her husband live in the house.
How does the narrator's "imaginative power" in "The Yellow Wallpaper" affect the story's meaning, particularly regarding the imagined presence of the woman in the wallpaper?
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," we might argue that the narrator's imaginative power has been so suppressed by her husband's so-called rest cure that it breaks out into full-blown mental illness by the end of the story. Let's see how this works.
The narrator is likely suffering from postpartum depression, but that condition was not recognized in her day. Rather, women were seen as merely hysterical or nervous, and doctors prescribed the rest cure like the narrator's doctor husband does. This called for no work, no visitors, and no stimulation. The narrator cannot even care for her child. Nor can she write, something she loves to do and something that directs her imagination in productive and healthy ways.
The narrator's husband thinks that her writing is just a "nervous weakness" and that her stories just excite her. Therefore, he forbids her to write. The narrator's imagination thus has no outlet. She cannot create a story about the people she imagines in the garden at the beginning of the tale. She might have turned such a fancy into a beautiful and meaningful story if she had been given the chance. It would have stimulated her mind, directed her imagination, and given her purpose.
But the narrator is not allowed to do this, so her imagination goes in other directions. In her boredom, the narrator focuses on the hideous wallpaper in her bedroom. She imagines that it moves, and the more she watches it, the more she sees. She imagines a prison and a woman trapped within it.
Again, the narrator has no outlet to create a story about this, to focus on its setting and plot and characterization. It remains trapped within her, and the power of her trapped imagination drags her down into full mental illness. She becomes the woman behind the wallpaper by the end of the story, and she breaks free (or at least thinks she does), never to go back to her prison.
What is a symbol or symbolic act in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and what does it mean?
While the wallpaper itself is certainly the central symbol in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” there are several other important symbols as well, including the narrator’s diary, the house, the rings and bars in the bedroom, and the narrator’s creeping. Let’s look briefly at each of these.
The narrator’s husband does not want her to write at all. He has prescribed the rest cure for her nervousness, and this means no stimulation, especially writing. Yet the narrator writes anyway, and we are reading part of her diary. She hides it from her husband, but this diary still represents an act of rebellion against her husband’s rules.
The house symbolizes rest and relaxation to the narrator’s husband, but to the narrator, it represents isolation. She would like to have visitors, but her husband will rarely allow them. Nor will he honor his wife’s request to leave the place early. The house becomes something of a prison.
The strange rings (likely shackles of some kind) and bars in the bedroom also symbolize the imprisonment of the narrator, first indirectly by her husband and then in her own madness by the end of the story.
Finally, the narrator’s creeping motions symbolize her total loss of sanity at the end of the story. She is only a shell of her former self, something bent and furtive, trapped in her own mind.
What are two symbols in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
Symbols abound in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and we can look especially to the wallpaper itself, the country house where the narrator is staying, and the narrator's diary as apt symbols. Let’s explore this in more detail.
The wallpaper is the story’s primary symbol. The stuff is hideous, a horrible yellow with swirling, chaotic patterns. It represents the narrator’s own mind, which is disturbed at the story’s beginning and unhinged by the end. The narrator has a case of nerves, which is actually probably postpartum depression in today’s terms, and her husband has prescribed the rest cure at the country house. The wallpaper is a source of fascination and then obsession for the narrator as she becomes more and more lost within her own mind. She begins to think she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. This woman, of course, stands for the narrator herself.
The country house, as nice as it may seem, becomes almost a prison to the narrator as her husband insists that she rest and follow his orders and not have company or stimulation, especially writing. The things in the attic room enhance the prison symbolism further. Yet the narrator does write, and her diary is a symbol of rebellion and self-assertion.
In the end, though, we watch the narrator’s neurosis turns to psychosis. She tears the wallpaper off the wall, freeing the woman inside, and she believes that she is freeing herself as well. Unfortunately, she is now trapped within the madness of her own mind. She thinks she has triumphed, but really her husband’s “cure” has defeated her in the end.