Overall, this story made for an interesting read. While it was slightly confusing in the beginning, as it progressed it started to make more sense. Charolette Perkins Gilman used great imagry to depict the setting of the story, giving the reader a visual, mental picture.
In summary, this story is about a woman, whom I interpreted to be young, perhaps newly married, who is spending the summer with her husband, who is a physician and the woman's caretaker, in a large, aged house. While it is not mentioned outright, the woman is suffering from a form of depression. The room that this young woman is residing in, in fact, that is all she does--as commanded by her caretaker/husband, is covered in a tattered, aged yellow wallpaper. As time marches slowly on, the woman becomes infatuated with the wallpaper, then obsessive. She convinces herself that she sees a pattern within the pattern that seems to depict the figure of a woman trying to emerge and flee from behind the yellow wallpaper. This drives the young, married, woman mad.
From early on in the story, I got a sense that this woman was being somewhat oppressed by her husband. With him forbidding her from doing any activity, including writing, and keeping her in the room with the yellow wallpaper, I could tell that she was feeling suppressed by her married life. In a way, I think that the yellow wallpaper was a symbol of her marriage. Tattered, worn, and with the illusion of a woman trying to escape from within it, the wallpaper reflects how she is feeling.
I definitely agree with you when you talk about how the story was confusing in the beginning but as the story went on it made so much more sense and ultimately provided a much greater reading experience. Personally, I loved this story and consider it to be one of my favorites we have read. I like how the author a topic that was not traditionally used and applied to an even more oppressed subject (at the time), women. I also agree that the wife in the story was always feeling suppressed by her husband and it is a shame that he didn't know and trust her well enough to help her when she was practically asking for it. But again, this was common for the time period but this story challenges this so well.
ReplyDeleteI definitely loved this story and I love that Gilman wrote this and it was released in the time it was. I'm thinking it was probably quite controversial being that first of all, women as writers wasn't exactly admired or revered and also, she addresses the oppression of women. Obviously she uses the example of one woman's situation, but I think a lot of things are to be said of it.
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