A Summary of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The repression of women’s purpose in society is an issue has as much effect as it did hundreds of years ago, as it does today. One example of a woman who felt this oppression is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who lived from 1860-1935. Born in Connecticut and raised in poverty, Gilman had little education. After the birth of her daughter, Gilman fell into a depression and was then subject to neurologist’s Weir Mitchell cure for the illness. The experience led her to write the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman then became a public speaker and author, with a feminist focus. She wrote such books as Women and Ecomonics, which urged women and to make careers for themselves and Herland, a fantasy world without men. Through her first short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman’s portrait of setting, character nature, and major conflict, also illustrates symbolism of the repression of women.
The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the time and place that the events of the story unfold. While no specific period of time is mentioned, evidence through character’s speech and the narrator’s writing makes it seem to be in the late eighteen hundreds to early nineteen hundreds. The narrator and her husband move into a house for the summer which the narrator says looks like, “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate” (Gilman 379). Though the narrator suspects the house to be haunted as she wonders “…why should it be let so cheaply? And why have [it] stood so long untenanted?” (Gilman 379). Most of the story, however, takes place inside of the house, in the room with the yellow wallpaper. Though the narrator makes it know that she would have preferred the room downstairs, she take direction from her husband and agrees to take the room in the upstairs. She refers to the room as one previously used for a nursery because of the “…windows barred for little children…and rings and things in the walls” (Gilman...