Ultimately, Charlotte Perkins Gilman draws upon her individual experience to describe the fragmented reality and the thoughts of a deranged minded woman in a male driven society.
Initially, the narrator's relationship with her husband, John, is trusting. She does not agree with his beliefs, however she believes that he knows best and feels somewhat guilty for her dissenting opinion. However, her conflicting emotions confuse her and lead her to gradually stop trusting him. She wishes to write in her diary more, but is forced to hide it from John as she knows he will disapprove of it. Writing is the only platform for expressing her thoughts and feelings without conflict, but keeping it a secret becomes too tiring. When the effort required to …show more content…
Specifically she claims to see her in the garden “on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines”. These figures could very well be the shadows of the many things growing in the garden that she has morphed, in her mind, into the shape of the artificial woman. The fact that she imagines the woman being able to escape during the day is most likely a reflection of her own desires, where she begins to mirror the woman’s actions; creeping in her room during the day. The yellow colour of the wallpaper symbolises sunlight, the time when John is active and dominant. Moonlight is traditionally a symbol for femininity, and that is when the narrator feels it is most safe, that is when the woman in the wallpaper begins to creep. The hallucination becomes a venue for her to be free of the reformatory she has been living in. Although the figure appears to be behind the wallpaper, from the outside looking in the protagonist would be the one behind the bars. The room with the yellow wallpaper is her jail cell, and night after night the woman in the paper taunts her with her freedom until the narrator has ripped the wallpaper all
Initially, the narrator's relationship with her husband, John, is trusting. She does not agree with his beliefs, however she believes that he knows best and feels somewhat guilty for her dissenting opinion. However, her conflicting emotions confuse her and lead her to gradually stop trusting him. She wishes to write in her diary more, but is forced to hide it from John as she knows he will disapprove of it. Writing is the only platform for expressing her thoughts and feelings without conflict, but keeping it a secret becomes too tiring. When the effort required to …show more content…
Specifically she claims to see her in the garden “on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines”. These figures could very well be the shadows of the many things growing in the garden that she has morphed, in her mind, into the shape of the artificial woman. The fact that she imagines the woman being able to escape during the day is most likely a reflection of her own desires, where she begins to mirror the woman’s actions; creeping in her room during the day. The yellow colour of the wallpaper symbolises sunlight, the time when John is active and dominant. Moonlight is traditionally a symbol for femininity, and that is when the narrator feels it is most safe, that is when the woman in the wallpaper begins to creep. The hallucination becomes a venue for her to be free of the reformatory she has been living in. Although the figure appears to be behind the wallpaper, from the outside looking in the protagonist would be the one behind the bars. The room with the yellow wallpaper is her jail cell, and night after night the woman in the paper taunts her with her freedom until the narrator has ripped the wallpaper all