Gilman identifies the stereotypical roles for women that serve to reaffirm the dominance of the male in society, to expose the way in which men circumscribe the intellectual growth of women. Gilman’s metaphorical presentation of daylight versus moonlight through the narrator’s analysis of the woman in the paper, who “is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight” reinforces the concept of males pushing women into the dark peripheries of moonlight. The male-dominated physical world of “daylight”, reason and structure is a stark contrast to the female inner-world of night where ‘fanciful imagination’2 and disorder can run wild. Another inference of the night-time can serve to reaffirm restricting and confining women to their reproductive …show more content…
This depiction of women is an allegory in the narrator’s mental ruin as the motif highlights male pragmatism over the female imagination: the wallpaper’s “pattern [lolling] like a broken neck”. The imagery of a “broken neck” is a metaphorical depiction of a murder of the female identity, symbolic through her confinement by her husband who ‘resembles the penal officers of the eighteenth-century psychiatric wards or penitentiaries’8. However, it can be argued that in the course of the narrator’s delusion and deterioration, she recognises that the wallpaper’s ugly pattern is imprisoning the hallucination of the ‘woman’ a projection of her inner self. Gilman hence, facilitates the narrator’s own “escape” who’s obsession with tearing the paper, figuratively breaks the bars of the cage in which she’s entrapped. By characterising her narrator as a prisoner in the room, her mind and societally: the narrator’s diagnosis of neurasthenia (commonly ascribed to women), the treatment of which involved the 'rest cure'; complete rest and no intellectual