The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has occasionally been placed in collections amid frightening ghost stories. However, its brand of disturbance is not found in the supernatural or paranormal, but rather in the reality of society and the horrors it commits in the oppression of women; apparently reality is truly more terrifying.

Women have been structured into given roles, roles that impose specific values on them in an effort to continually reestablish their “proper” function in society; these roles that have been given to women are restrictive and violating to the innate sense of individualism that makes up the separate personalities of the human community. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” responds to these issues and prompts the reader to consider the entrapment of the female narrator. This fascinating literary account is a metaphorical unearthing of the problems with a society that has placed individuals in specific molds of conduct and potential, and it creates a disturbing awareness designed to move the reader toward correcting these engrained fallacies.

Nevertheless, it is important to understand some of Gilman’s philosophies about the relations between men and women to fully ascertain what views “The Yellow Wallpaper” is responding to. There is an intricate correlation between her beliefs as expressed in Women And Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women and her use of the literary forum in this short story that is undoubtedly a consistent assertion of her feminist values.