More Than Poor Interior Decorating

A woman gives birth and her life is never the same. The new mother’s hormones are imbalanced and she becomes someone that she has never been before; it is like she is a different person. She snaps and must be separated from her child; and, quite frankly, from most of society. The woman and her husband take a vacation to help her readjust. This is to be a time for her to get used to the idea of being a mother and to become mentally stable. This isolation she is thrust into, however, has adverse effects and she becomes crazier each day. Such is the life of a woman experiencing post-partum depression.

This scenario is developed in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” A woman and her husband go to a summer house after she has given birth and the woman is confined to a room once used as a nursery and playroom for a boys’ school. In this room, the walls are covered in yellow wallpaper with some sort of intricate design on it. Within the design the new mother swears she sees a creeping woman. By the end of the story she is convinced that this woman is herself and she has finally been set free from the confinement of the flat life of the walls. There are lines that she sees as paths upon which the creeping woman travels in the pattern of the yellow wallpaper as well. The paper itself is badly stained with awkward patterns by the incoming sunlight.

The main theme of this story is entrapment. The woman feels held down by several factors, physical and psychological. Physically, she is now responsible for a child and husband. She is also physically confined to a single room for most of the summer, which leads to her psychological imprisonment within the pattern of the wallpaper. She feels that she is trapped in this room’s walls themselves, as a creeping woman along random paths. The brink of her insanity occurs at the same moment when she feels most free, when she finally feels as though the woman is creeping around her room, out of the confines of the yellow patterned paper. She feels that she truly is the one who was creeping along the random pathways and found her way out, but she also feels as though that the woman must be tied down so she does not escape the room and she ends up tying the rope to herself. She hands the responsibility to her husband by throwing the key to her room out the window. And suddenly, her entrapment no longer consumes only herself, but also her husband, dooming her to walk over him along the paths for the rest of her life.

Within this powerful and poignant story of Gilman’s, there is so much symbolism. The yellow color represents staleness, much like the new mother’s life. It is really a gross color that she is surrounded by; and, one can see that this can parallel the woman’s feelings about illness, diapers, and responsibility for another life considering her condition. Another symbolic element is Gilman’s use of the pattern on the wallpaper. The pattern signifies the different paths the woman is forced to consider, not only for herself, but also for her family. It also portrays the mother’s sense of eerieness and creeping through the night, much like any normal mother does as her newborn cries for her in the God-forsaken hours of the night. The mother’s throwing of the key symbolizes revolt against authority and confinement. The rope is a symbol for eternal entrapment and succumbence to one’s insecurities, as well as, to the power of others.

At first, I really felt like this story was going to be static and a waste of time to read. However, after finishing it and then reading it a second time, I could see its significance to the plight of a mother under the influence of post-partum depression. I saw that though the title suggests a simpler central theme, the true theme was complex, enveloping so many levels of entrapment and insecurity. It was an interesting story overall.