The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses on a woman who is struggling with post traumatic syndrome after recently having a baby. Her doctor, who is also her husband, gives her the diagnosis to stay in bed all day and eventually thinking she will get better. From lying in bed all day she starts studying the yellow wallpaper, thinking she sees something in it. By the end of the story, it has driven her crazy and realizes the woman she sees in the wallpaper is really her and breaks free.
The setting where the story is takes place in the nineteenth century in a large, summer home. The narrator is primarily stuck in one of the bedrooms within the house with yellow wallpaper. The story never gives her a name, but that she is a young, upper- …show more content…
The word is used about twenty times to describe the wallpaper or the situation of the narrator. For example the author talking about the wallpaper when she says “I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another (Gilman).” She uses that word mainly to describe how she felt creeped out by the wallpaper. The narrator also talks about how she felt creepy one night, but did not want to wake John, so she kept still and watched the moonlight reflect on the wallpaper all night. I think this word is used a lot, mainly to describe how crept the narrator felt about the wallpaper, but could not do anything about it until she finally told John how she felt. Using the word “creepy” so much at the beginning of the story gives foreshadowing as to how the character is hopeless to her situation. She eventually becomes her own creeping by becoming obsessed with the wallpaper. The wording of the story gave it a mysterious and somewhat “scary” feeling because it made the reader wonder what was going to happen next and think about who is really behind the walls of the yellow wallpaper by the way the narrator describes what she is …show more content…
Marriage in the time period the story was written did not give women a chance to stand up for their self, but to do what their husbands told them to do. The narrator had to listen to what John wanted her to do because she could not stand up for herself and even if she tried John would have not listened to her. The narrator was not able to give her own self expression. By her not being able to express herself gives another theme to the story by seeing how she breaks free at the end and her expressing how she feels she realizes how she was the one trapped behind the wallpaper. The last theme the story is trying to prove is the resting cure that John made her do. John thought by making her rest all day in bed would cure her, but by reading the story you can tell it just made it worse for the narrator and it made her go more crazy.
Although the yellow wallpaper is symbolism, the color of the wallpaper does not affect how the character is feeling. The color of the wallpaper did not really matter. If the wallpaper would have not been yellow the narrator would still be affected by her situation and still would have went crazy. When you think of the color yellow you usually think of happy, or think of the sun, but in this situation you think of sadness and being trapped. If the wallpaper would have been pink or blue the narrator would still have gone