Symbols and Symbolism Essay - Imagery and Symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

Imagery and Symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper On my first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, I found the short drool extremely well done and the author, successful at getting her idea across. Gilmans use of imagery and symbolism only adds to the reality of the unidentified briny characters render life and slow progression into insanity or some might say, out of insanity. The short story is written in first person and it is from our nameless characters writings that we are introduced to her ground and her life. It is through this that we see our main characters transition into a world that only she has access to. She changes dramatically from our first meeting while everyone else be very flat and unaffected. This method is very effective in that this story from someone elses perspective would not be as real and understanding. The outside world would have written about a crazy woman who slowly goes mad for no reason. Only through her eyes can we see the straight reason for her, not madness, epiphany. The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing exclusively good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me bunco without special direction. It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house. Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a prison-like room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.