The Yellow Wallpaper essay

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The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper is just a horror story about one woman’s descent into madness”

I agree to a small extent to this statement. On the surface, the Yellow wallpaper could be seen simply as a gothic horror story, as Gilman creates senses of eeriness by evolving the narrator from having a slight nervous depression to sheer insanity. However, by taking a deeper look at The Yellow Wallpaper’s concept, the story seems to be centred on the oppression of women in society back in the olden days. The narrator’s lunacy is not simply rooted in the nervous depression her husband constantly reminds her of, nor is the madness driven by the ghastly yellow wallpaper. Her insanity is instead, created by her husband’s ideology that women were to be looked down upon. Gilman has developed this simple diary of a mad woman into a story about the oppression of women in society, using dialogues, and objects as well as other elements in the Yellow Wallpaper as symbols to convey this concept to the audience.

‘…those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere….the eyes go up and down the line, one higher than the other.’

  The writer’s use of sickening and disturbing adjectives here creates a sense of horror to this story. The ghostly unblinking eyes scattered everywhere on the wallpaper fits into the genre of a gothic horror story. However, the ‘unblinking eyes’ can also suggest that the narrator has no freedom and is being watched all the time- just as all the other women in society back then were. Thus, this eerie sentence is not simply a factor to intimidate the readers. The eyes symbolise men as they forbid women to have any freedom back in the olden days, and the wallpaper represents the narrator’s prison. The reason for these hallucinations of unblinking eyes is the treatment that the narrator has in order to cure her nervous depression.  She is forced to stay at home, locked up in her room with no contact with the outside world, as the men (John and the doctor) believe that she is weak, timid, and fragile, like a flower. Therefore, being trapped inside the nursery room, which makes her deeply obsessed with the wallpaper causes the imaginary eyes, heads, and women that are symbols for imprisonment of women by men.

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“They get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!”

  The quotation above may seem horrific if looked at simply, as it states that the wallpaper shows heads been violently strangled off and turned upside down revealing dead eyes, making the reader feel disturbed and sickened. However, there are no heads and strangling in the wallpaper’s pattern, as these are the result of the narrator’s descent into madness. This supports the idea that the Yellow Wallpaper may simply be a gothic horror story about a woman going insane. ...

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