The

Yellow Wallpaper:
Oppression Through Gender Roles

The institution of marriage has been a part of the human experience since the
beginning of civilization, bending and shifting as different cultures grow and evolve.
For centuries, marriage was a business and biological contract made between men;
women were the collateral. In the modern western world, marriage is regarded as a
consensual partnership built from love and mutual respect. When Charlotte Perkins
Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, marriage was not a strict business contract,
but there still existed definite roles the man and woman were to inhabit. A mans
role was to go out into the world and the womans role was to stay in and care for
the home. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores the
restrictive nature of a womans role in a 19th century marriage through the
narrators changing relationship with the yellow wallpaper.

The yellow wallpaper lines the walls of the room in which the narrator will

be staying at the instruction of her husband. The speaker has been prescribed the
resting cure by her husband, John, and brought to a secluded mansion in the
country to eliminate sensory over-stimulation. The narrator disagrees with Johns
ideas, [she believes] that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do
[her] good(1035), but John is a doctor and his air of superiority marginalizes her;
she resigns herself to his will, what is one to do(1035)? John chooses the old
nursery for his wife-patient; she does not like it, but again she defers to his will and
wisdom. However, she cannot hide her distaste for the yellow wallpaper lining the

walls, [she] never saw a worse paper in [her] life. One of those sprawling,
flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin (1036).
The narrators reaction to the wallpaper is immediate and harsh, symbolic of
the first time a woman sees and understands the restrictions of the domestic role of
a woman in society. She is unsure of the origin of her repulsion, but she strongly and
clearly detests what she sees. Though he finds her aversion to the paper comical,
John agrees to repaper the room; he quickly changes his mind, because after the
wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred
windows, and then the gate at the head of the stairs, and so on (1037). John fears
that his wife will never be satisfied if he grants her the first concession; symbolizing
societys fear that granting women small liberties will disrupt and destroy the status
quo. So, the narrator is left to her own devices in a room she dislikes, staring at a
wallpaper she despises.

John, undoubtedly, believed that his wife would get over her distaste of the

wallpaper and slowly emerge from her postpartum depression with a renewed zeal
for domestic life; instead, the narrator becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper,
and begins to retreat into herself. She spends her days alone, trying to decipher the
pattern of the puzzling wallpaper. She resolves to study the paper until she makes
sense of it, but she [knows] a little of the principle of designand this [pattern] was
not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or
anything else that [she] ever heard of (1039). There is no logic guiding the paper,
like there is no logic guiding the societal norms that say a womans place is in the
house. A woman may try to understand why she is not supposed to engage in

intellectual pursuits, or why her husband has no household responsibilities; and,

when no logical explanations are offered, she may try to twist her perspective and
squint her eyes and pull a small piece of rationalization from the depths of a distant
history. Similarly, the narrator [exhausts herself] trying to distinguish the order
and she discovers there is one end of the room where [the pattern] is almost intact,
and there, when the cross-lights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, [she]
can almost fancy radiation after all (1039). As her obsession with the wallpaper
deepens, the narrator increasingly withdrawals from John and her caretaker, Jennie;
she sleeps during the day, and lays awake at night examining the effect of moonlight
on the wallpaper. The moonlight reveals a woman trapped behind the repulsive
pattern, and the narrator finally understands the pattern; the pattern isnt art, it is a
jail for the woman living in the wallpaper. The narrator shifts her attention from the
pattern of the wallpaper to the woman trapped behind it. To reach this clarity, the
narrator has descended into a perceived insanity, symbolizing how a woman in the
19th century was perceived when she questioned her subjugation and decided to
escape her oppression.

The narrator recognizes the true nature of the wallpaper; the woman in the

paper is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that
pattern-it strangles so(1043), and the narrator determines to help her escape. Once
she has made this decision, escape consumes her mind, and the deterioration of her
sanity is rapid; the narrator no longer distinguishes between herself and the woman
in the wallpaper, removing any doubt that the narrator had felt imprisoned by her
husband and his resting cure. She exclaims, Ive got out at last..in spite of you..

And Ive pulled off most of the paper, so you cant put me back(1043)! She
recognizes and rebukes the destiny of all women to be confined to domestic roles, a
seemingly insane assertion to the 19th century perspective. Perhaps, she has gone
crazy; perhaps, society perceives her as crazy because she no longer accepts the jaillike restrictions of the womans role in a 19th century marriage.
The first person to point out a flaw with a social norm is often criticized, or
even worse jailed; for decades, women were institutionalized for expressing a desire
for equality with their mail counterparts. Through the narrators developing
relationship with the wallpaper in The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman critiques the oppressive nature of the 19th century gender roles. Gilman
artfully shows how a cycle of oppression and repression can be destructive, but is
not inevitable if a person is willing rebel at any cost. Ultimately, a house can easily
become a prison if a person is never allowed to leave; a marriage can easily become
an agent of oppression if a persons voice is silenced, as Mae West famously said,
marriage is a fine institution, but Im not ready for an institution.








Work Cited:

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wallpaper. Literature for Life, edited by X. J.
Kennedy, Dana Gioia, and Nina Revoyr, Pearson , 2013, pp.1035-1045.