Women and Fiction in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpaper essays

Women and Fiction in The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper is a deceptively simple fable. It is easy to companion the thirteen pages of narrative and conclude the protagonist as insane. This is a fair judgement, after all no healthy minded individual becomes so caught up with hideous and infuriating wallpaper to lose sleep over it, much less lock herself in a room to tear the wallpaper down. To be able to imagine such things as broken necks and bulbous eyes in the wallpaper is understandable, irrational and erratic designs can form rational patterns in our minds, still to see a woman locked inside of the bars of the wallpaper and attempt to rescue her seems altogether crazy. Her fascination with the wallpaper does seem odd to us, but it easy to focus on the eccentricity of her interest with paper and lose sight of what the wallpaper institutes her writing. It is her writing that keeps her sane, the wallpaper that makes her insane, and from these two very symbolic poles the short story rotates. Gilmans short story is not simply about a lonely womans descent into hysteria, but is symbolic of previous and contemporary women writers attempt to overcome the madness and bias of the established, male dominated literary society that surrounds them. From the very beginning of the narrators vacation, the surroundings seem not right. There is something queer about the mansion where she resides it becomes diaphanous that her attempt to rest from her untold illness will not follow as planned. The house is an ancestral and hereditary estate...long untenanted invoking fanciful gothic images of a haunted house (3). The house they choose to reside in for the three... ... The Yellow Wallpaper is not simply a story of a woman whose mental imagery drives her insane, it is a symbolic story of the woman writer who wishes to free herself from the conventions of the male dominated literary world. Gilmans proposes that women can achieve such sta tus that they deserve, but that they moldiness first acknowledge and see truthfully the madness surroundings, the tenets created by men, and become driven by the madness to overcome it. It is not impossible, but an uphill struggle won by many others. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is proof of this her work is wholly a part of the literary canon, among the best of her male peers. Though this be madness, yet in that respect is method in t -Shakespeare WORK CITED Perkins, Charlotte Perkins. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Editor Ann J. Lane. New York Pantheon, 1980.