The Yellow Wallpaper -- English Literature

The yellow paperThe Yellow Wall-Paper, by Charlotte Gilman Perkins, can be read as asimple story of a young woman suffering from postpartum depression.Her husband is unsympathetic to her needs, her doctor refuses toacknowledge her well(p) illness, and her emotional state origins as aresult of being forced to stay inside her room in the middle of hervacation with no lodge except the yellow wallpaper. But, on a deeperlevel, it is this room and the wallpaper that is pasted all over itthat is symbolic and allows the fabricator to materialize her depressionand slowly decline into insanity.In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes herself ashaving temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency.(169) The narrator is well aware of her condition, and it is apparentthat she is in like manner aware of what her condition may lead to. But, if itwerent for certain imprisoning aspects of her surround, hercondition might have never progressed to complete insanity. Fore xample, the windows of the narrators room set out a materializationof the world that squeezes her into the tiny jail of her own mind, andthe wallpaper represents this state of that mind. The room was onceused as a nursery, and thus its environment makes the narrator feellike a child, like a being who is taken less seriously than she shouldbe. She is in a room where the windows are barricaded for littlechildren, and there are rings and things in the walls. (170) Theprotective bars on the windows are symbolic of the protectiveness ofher husband, John, and his well-meaning but ultimately unhelpfulsuggestions. The narrator is a prisoner in her place of rest, and herhusband is but the jailer, watching over ... ...per as I did? (180) She believesthat by locking herself in her symbolic personal prison and tearingoff the wall-paper that is symbolic of her mental state, she isreleasing herself from all of the expectations of her husband and allthe depression she felt throughout the story .The narrators visible environment and the symbolism it containedallowed her to materialize her depression and descend into insanity.It is clear that it is possible to view the wallpaper as a reflectionof the narrators state of mind and the fact that she took on thecharacter of the woman in the wallpaper to allow herself to break freeof the ties that bound her. The confinement of the barred room and thedisturbingly vivid wallpaper proved not only to be complimentary tothe story, but also to foreshadow the narrators escape fromdepression into a new field of study of insanity.