The Yellow Wallpaper

While reading "The Yellow Wallpaper", by Charlotte Gilman, I felt that the woman behind the wallpaper was a description of herself. She made it clear in the end that it was, but while reading the passage, I thought she was being ridiculous. The ways that she described the woman behind the wallpaper helped make her case insane. To me, the woman she saw was her shadow. Her shadow was the woman who was stuck behind the wallpaper and couldn't get out, which was a metaphor for how Gilman was stuck behind her husband's words and couldn't escape. As a woman in the 1890's, she was almost a child to her husband. She couldn't do anything without his permission, his opinion was the only one that mattered, and all of her requests were met with him talking down to her like a child.. i.e. when he calls her a "little girl" and says "bless her little heart" (375). She is the woman stuck behind the bars, which could also be described as stuck in her husband's prison. She isn't even allowed to visit her cousins because John, her husband said no.

Her writing could easily be compared to the painting of the woman and the child that we talked about in class. The woman in the painting is tending to her womanly duties of sewing, caring for her child, and sitting. She is stuck in the prison which society has deemed appropriate for her. Gilman was to follow the "rest cure" which meant that she couldn't write, care for her child, and had to lie in bed most of the day, the prison created by her husband. Both woman appear to be suppressed by what others have chosen to be the correct things for them to be doing.