The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay Example for Free

The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, strong themes of captivity and entrapment are in play in regards to how women perceive their specific situations. In the story, the troubled narrator goes through a lot of soul searching, but after a while, the wallpaper itself in the story is given much more meaning by the author. Over time, the actual wallpaper in the story becomes more than just decoration. Over time, it becomes a representation of the way that women are often trapped in their own domestic situation. The wallpaper traps the narrator through its design, which is complicated and takes up a lot of the narrator’s time. She is also trapped because of the wallpaper’s associated meaning to her life, as it brings up the bad memories that she does not want to remember. The third and perhaps most important way that the yellow wallpaper limits the narrator and traps her is through the social connotations that went along with the color at the time. Yellow was not associated with many positive things, and the narrator had knowledge of this. Though the narrator feels more trapped in a figurative sense, the actual wallpaper itself is quite limiting because of its complicated design, as well. In the beginning of the story, the narrator finds herself exploring the wallpaper design, which takes up her time. Though she would like to go through with her normal, day to day activities, she is forced to spend the majority of her time mulling over the complicated nature of the yellow colored wallpaper. Over time, she begins to see things in the wallpaper that she did not see before. Eventually, the narrator sees strong imagery within the wallpaper and it serves as a moving experience. She sees a vision of herself within the wallpaper – a real life picture of a woman struggling to break free from the toil and insanity of her everyday life. Once the narrator realizes what she sees within the wallpaper, she begins to associate that with her life in a way that almost drives her crazy. In the past, the narrator sees the wallpaper as being something of a watchdog that keeps her in her place. Once she starts to break down the wallpaper’s design, this leads her to associate the wallpaper with her struggle in life. Though the wallpaper is made out of paper, it seems more like prison bars to her because it reminds her, each and every day, of what her life has become. She is domesticated and that is what she is expected to be. The narrator has become locked in to what a woman is supposed to be in her society. Yellow is a color that is supposed to represent femininity and everything that is right about women. Instead, it becomes a signal to her about everything that is wrong with the way she is being forced to live her life. Though it would be easy to break through the wallpaper itself, she would never be able to break out of the domesticated life that had taken over her creativity and everything else that she had once hoped to accomplish in life. At some point in the story, the narrator begins to become a little bit crazy over the wallpaper. She begins to break it down in ways that it was never intended to be broken down. One of those ways is through analyzing the actual color itself. Yellow, as mentioned before, was a color that was supposed to represent goodness. Instead of seeing it as that, she begins to realize all of the negative connotations that go along with the color yellow. She associates it with many unpleasant medical conditions, including jaundice. More importantly than that, the narrator sees the color as a representation of the sun, which was both powerful and controlling. It was the dominant force of the universe and something that, like the wallpaper and her life, she could not get away from. The other social connotation that goes along with yellow is the idea of oppression of minorities. Chinese people in particular were associated with this color and that sort of racism was another negative aspect of the color. In order to truly assume a position of self worth, the narrator had to break through all of these things, including the color barrier associated with the wallpaper. In the short story, wallpaper, which was meant to be positive, works as a restricting force in trapping one woman in her own life. It should be a symbol of the perfect domestic life, but it instead acts as prison bars for women who feel that they cannot truly be themselves because of the limiting nature of the wallpaper. The many different negative things about the wallpaper all combine together to create something that was powerful enough to nearly drive one woman crazy. In the story, if a woman was to break free from the oppression of her domestic situation, she had to break through both the symbolic barriers and the actual wallpaper that was limiting her life.