The Yellow Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Book Report/Review Example

Diagnostic Essay: The Yellow Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Paper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman successfully combines the features of setting, character/s and theme to make this work of fiction an interesting and enjoyable read. The setting or location of a short such as a particular room in "haunted" house in the Yellow Paper gives a short story a central point where the plot can be unraveled and also could give the aura or feel of the story. The character or characters of a short story gives a work of fiction its breath or muscle of reality - the element from which readers could empathize or understand what the short story is all about.

The theme is the subject of the story, one that provides why the short story is worth reading - with its philosophical underpinnings, or deeper undertones. In the Yellow Paper, when a couple chances upon an "ancestral house" long untenanted at the beginning of the story - the reader is once alerted that the short story's setting will have a key role in how the story would go or end. Further into the story, the setting's centers on a room upstairs covered with creepy yellow wallpaper as narrated by the woman who is also the protagonist.

It is the room which the husband, a doctor chooses for his wife so that she would recover from her nervous illness. That the room was a nursery before certainly ties to the important note that the woman has recently given birth to a child, a child in which she has been declared unfit to care for. The woman narrates, "I never saw a worse paper in my life." The yellow paper also gives a hint at the courageous observation of the character, a commentary on her situation: "It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide -- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

" The woman who is almost being locked against her will in the room with the yellow paper is the character who gives the story its riveting tale of madness and an individual's struggle for freedom. The woman is being treated as a mentally sick person who is all but disbarred from having a normal life out in the sun - so that according to the dictates of the husband, also her doctor she would soon get well. The woman's lot is indeed typical of a wife in the late 19th century, domesticated and given to following "loving" husband's pronouncements.

What probably differentiates the character is that she is a writer, and that she is able to pour out her soul in her journals and in there she could discern the truth, one not even recognize by her husband as her one great strength: "There comes John, and I must put this away, -- he hates to have me write a word." The theme of course is a woman's struggle to maintain her sanity by the enforced values and treatment of society as personified by her husband, who is not aware how women could not be happy being merely posted in the house, without work or outside interests to sustain their lives outside family life.

In the story the yellow paper somehow reinforced the personal truth as gleaned by the character - its hideous pattern and smell synonymous that of society's treatment of women or people with who do not go by the norms. The woman in her descent into madness took the wallpaper down seeing that she is the woman trapped in it and found that she would now be free to go outside. In combination, the setting of the room with the yellow paper, the character's sane and insane qualities and the theme of freedom against societal norms have made the Yellow Paper a very memorable and enjoyable experience for a reader.

The author has chosen well in all these features in combination to make her art of fiction one that would be considered a classic. Source: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston 1899.Prepared for the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center. http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2id=GilYell.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all