The Yellow Wallpaper - Essay Example

(Gilman, 28) Drowning, however, transpires not only death or thrashing of self, but also a pursuit for discovering the self. Discussion The narrator's flaking away the wallpaper for finding the ensnared woman within is symbolic of her plunge into her own psyche, from which revisiting, rebirth, "surfacing," is doable. This rebirth connotes again the recurrent image of dying and death that is prevalent in The Yellow Wallpaper. The narrator moves down into madness before she can appear as justly and divinely sane.

In her jump deep into the wallpaper, bearing the ‘repellent’ color that was almost ‘revolting’ (Gilman, 32), she discovers not only repugnant images of suffocation and imprisonment but also a mirror figure of her own ripped psyche. This equates death to some extent. The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" has a very slow demise. The story covers the summer months. She reveals several glimpses of her perceptions of her husband and his treatment of her. Although she never mentions physical abuse, the reader is lead to believe John is very indifferent to his wife's feelings and needs.

He seems to have very little time for her and does not really even believe she is sick. This gives some insight into why she might feel a need to escape. The writings about her slight hysteria give way to very disturbing images of her creeping along the walls of her room as though desperately seeking an escape. Because "The Yellow Wallpaper" is told in first-person format and from the central character's point of view, the reader is confronted with a vast amount of information about her emotions.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the central character is a woman who feels trapped and is searching for an escape. That escape comes for both of them in the end, although it is not an expected form of escape. After all, nobody would expect to escape an unhappy life by plunging into insanity or by dying. Insanity may be called in some ways the intellectual death. But that is the escape found by these two women. It is based on the repression of women in the 19th century and also exposes the pitiable state of equality of women in societies.

Women have been considered the creature that can be suppressed and oppressed in the desired manner by the male dominating societies. Male chauvinism has always been exercised on women which is parallel to death of a real feministic survival in society. A woman has been considered a tool or instrument of satisfaction and no more than that. This is what may be called the death of a whole gender. Undeniably, this touches the topic of feminism and liberation of women from social stratification. The woman who was confined in the room fundamentally represents all women in society who strive for equal rights.

However, the wallpaper replicates what the major character and women was passing through. By shredding the wallpaper down, the protagonist held that she could win her self-determination, which indeed happened at the conclusion. The very title bears a great significant image of death or dying. Yellow is an emblem of lifelessness or in other words death. The fissures and markings on the wallpaper demonstrate the moans of women and the color yellow represent death or dying. The bed represents their marriage and the woman she saw behind the bars in the wallpaper