The Yellow Wallpaper - Literature review Example

The Yellow Wallpaper In literature, there are many short stories which convey their themes differently. Some short stories fail to relate all they can because of their length, leaving the reader with a lessened experience. Others convey a great message despite their length and leave readers in awe of what they have read. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the latter. Using a psychological spin, Gilman relays her views on the inferior position of women in marriage as well as the dangers of disregarding the mental health patient as a person in the 19th century.

The first point that is interesting to regard is the character, John. John is both the narrator’s husband and her doctor. By making him both, Gilman gives readers the opportunity to interpret him as the quintessential evil figure of the story. Upon further consideration, however, a reader can deduce that John is not entirely evil. John is merely a victim of his environment. He is a doctor who believes wholeheartedly in the factual, statistical world. He knows nothing else. He loves his wife, but is overwhelmed by her disease.

Rather than submitting to her requests to be allowed to do her work as a wife, he turns to fact because he believes it will fix everything. The conflict of being both a husband and a doctor doesn’t occur to him. There is a reason, however, why doctors do not treat themselves or, typically, their family members. He so entirely believes that what he’s doing is right for her that he ignores her complaints and essentially writes them off as eccentricities that are a result of her depression. He looks at her as only two things: a wife and a patient.

In doing so, he fails to see the person she is first and foremost. The idea of escape is what the yellow wallpaper itself symbolizes. The narrator believes she sees crawling under the wallpaper. She eventually sees more, remarking “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,” (Gilman). Here, Gilman is referring to how women are trapped by the stereotypes of their gender. Some try to escape while others fall into complacency.

It is those who fall in complacency that make the struggle that much harder for the women who choose to fight. At this time, women were trying to escape oppression by the men in their lives. Medicine and marriage were just two of the places where women found themselves being forced to fall to the command of the man, one who believed he knew what was best for them. At one point of the story, the narrator writes “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad,” (Gilman).

Here, we see how the narrator’s desire for more is shut down. Again, Gilman relays the message that women had a desire to get out and achieve more. She felt that women who were expressing these desires were not only being shut down by the men in their lives, but being made to feel bad about the fact that they wanted more. While Gilman’s narrator discusses expressing her feelings and dismissing them because of what her husband has said, it is important to note that by writing down that she has these feelings and has expressed them, the narrator is defying what is being asked of her.

This signifies Gilman’s stance that women should stand up on whatever level they could do so, despite the attempts men made to restrict them. “The Yellow Wallpaper” delves deep into the psychology of the human mind, coming across as a scary story that readers can enjoy for that purpose. There is a greater meaning behind this short story, however, which becomes evident. Through her use of setting, characterization, and theme, Gilman shares her views on the oppressiveness of medicine and marriage in her time.