The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Example for Free

The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Throughout the study of literature, it is believed that most works cannot be fully understood without a biographical strategy. In order to understand a work, the reader must understand the author’s life and experiences to grasp the full concept of that work. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† Gilman uses symbolism, personification, and other literary tools to portray the way women were treated throughout this particular era. Gilman also uses a romanticism approach when writing â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper†. The narrator believes that the woman trapped in the wallpaper, symbolizes her and all the other women living in the male dominant society. Romanticism represents an art for arts sake. Born in 1860, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was forced into an era of male supremacy. Gilman was abandoned by her father from infancy and often left into the care of relatives including Harriet Beecher Stowe and feminist activists, Isabella Beecher Hooker and Catherine Beecher. Strong and influential women, struggling for their place in a male dominant world, shaped Gilman’s childhood. The women made Gilman an independent young lady, teaching her importance of exercise and philosophy, over that of clothes and jewelry. At the age of 24, Gilman married her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson. After having her daughter the next year, Gilman went into a deep depression. The noted neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, examined her. He told her to follow his ‘rest cure’ of complete bed rest and limited intellectual activity. This meant no writing. Gilman realized that this ridiculous cure was actually driving her more insane, so she removed herself from Mitchells care. When her health got better during a trip to California she paired her emotional problems to her marriage and decided to leave her husband. In 1900, Gilman married for the second time to her cousin George Houghton Gilman. Gilman continued her feministic journey until discovering she was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. She left a final note that read, â€Å"When one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. Charlotte Perkins Gilman took her life on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California, at the age of 75. Gilman’s main intent in â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† is to portray the way women were viewed and treated during this time period. In the later 19th century, men were the superior race. Women oftentimes went from being born into a house with a father; to being married off to someone they weren’t exactly happy to be with, leaving no time for a woman to experience life without someone â€Å"in-charge† of them. Gilman did not want to be like other woman of this time, she redefined womanhood, proclaiming that men and women were to be equal. This ‘new woman’ was to be an intelligent, well-informed, and well-educated free thinker, the creator and expresser of her own ideas. She was to be economically self-sufficient, socially independent, and politically active. She would share the opportunities, duties, and responsibilities of the workplace with men, and together they would share the solitude of the hearth. Finally, the new woman was to be as informed, assertive, confident, and influential as she was compassionate, nurturing, loving, sensitivea woman of the world as well as of the home. Gilmans vision of an autonomous female challenged not only the traditional cult of true womanhood but the concepts and values of family, home, religion, community, capitalism, and democracy. † (De Simone) â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† starts off with the main character, Jane, talking of a â€Å"colonial mansion,† that seems to be a place to vacation. Gilman gives detail of this set-back home that almost gives the reader an eerie feeling, which foreshadows events to come. When Jane starts to describe her husband, she gives the sense that he mocks her and he often laughs at her. This symbolization gives insight to her own life where she often felt mocked and taken for granted by men. As the story goes in deeper, Jane tells that she is going to the house because of the rest care she was prescribed, very similar to that of Gilman’s. When they get to the house, Jane enables the reader to see the room with the yellow wallpaper. The windows were barred and there were restraints on the bed and she tells of scratches on the walls and ceilings. Jane believes that this room could have been a nursery or a babysitting room, but this does not make sense because when Jane reaches out to scratch the walls, she can barely even touch. How could a young child have ever reached if Jane, a grown woman, could not? As time goes on, Jane gradually learns to enjoy the room she is staying in, except for the dreaded yellow wallpaper. After being in the room for so long and dwelling on the wallpaper, Jane discovers someone trapped behind it. Jane believes she is getting better in health, but secretly is becoming obsessed with the woman, or so she believes, behind the wallpaper. Throughout the story, Gilman uses the romanticism approach. Romanticism expresses sensibility and passion. A romantic writer incorporates symbols, myths and images in their writing to help tell the story. Jane recognizes herself as the women trapped in the wallpaper. She believes that it symbolizes her feeling trapped in the house and under the control of her husband. She uses the Gilman tells of the room with barred windows and restraints as if it were a normalcy. Reading more into the story, the reader can gather that Gilman was symbolizing this room as a woman in a man’s world. The windows are barred, showing that there is no escape from that way, as there is no escaping a man in the universe. The restraints symbolize that a man can hold a woman back, along with keeping her close so that she doesn’t wander off. The idea of the woman creeping behind the paper mirrors Jane creeping to write, while being told that it is not recommended for her treatment. Although the ideas may be far out, the story that Gilman tells reflects her own life in many ways. When Gilman introduces the woman behind the wallpaper, it’s almost as if she is introducing herself into the story. Jane possesses many qualities and characteristics that Gilman portrayed in her own life and when Jane sees the woman in the wallpaper, it’s just like Gilman’s conflict with her own mind. It symbolizes a woman’s want to break away from society and be her own person in this world that has a complete control over her. Whether it’s a father, husband, or even brother, this time period focused on male’s first. The woman was told what to do and how to act and there was no room left for questions or disobedience. â€Å"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. John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper. † (Gilman 165) This quote displays Jane’s new obsession with the wallpaper and the thought that she is truly getting better. The fact that she mentions John’s happiness with her health leads the reader to think that he is a caring man, but after understanding Gilman’s own life, makes the reader see him as the domineering husband that he is. ’Ive got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And Ive pulled off most of the paper, so you cant 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! † This last quote is one of the most meaningful parts of the entire short story. While saying this, Jane makes herself become the woman in the wallpaper. Not only is it just a thought anymore, but when she lashes at her husband by saying â€Å"you and Jane,† Jane loses her sense of identity and takes on the role of the woman behind the wallpaper. She tells him that he cannot put her back, symbolizing that Jane does no longer want to be restrained to the room, nor him. Even after he faints, he is still in Jane’s way, leaving her to creep around him still. â€Å"Even while considering herself a writer, and implying that she could have been a notable artist, throughout her life, Gilman qualified her artistic achievements by insisting that what she had done was ‘perfect of its kind, but not art'; that she was devoted to ‘literature and lecturing,’ but that her writing was ‘not, in the artistic sense, literature. (Heilmann) Gilman was an impeccable example of what happens when a woman’s potential is seen over. She led a successful life and her work has helped the female race raise awareness of their capability in life. Although Gilman lived a long time ago, her work then has given females today a better understanding of where they have been, but also where they are going.