Yellow Wall Paper
A Repressed Woman Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” is a story of the lack of liberty that women faced in the 1800s, a time when what women had to say was not given much importance. ... On the very first page of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman illustrates the male-dominated society. ... Inside the room, the wall-paper intrigues her. The paper at first was “stripped off [. ... ] I never saw a worse paper in my life” (391). ... After staring at the paper for so long, the narrator believes images begin to appear. She sees a woman behind the paper. Her attitude begins to change towards the paper; she no longer calls it “horrid” with a “pointless pattern” but becomes intrigued by it: “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper [. ... With absolutely nothing else to do the narrator is reduced to staring endlessly at a pattern in the wall-paper, creating some image that she feels is necessary to find out. ... The narrator is trying to compare herself to the woman behind the wall-paper. ... The woman is behind the paper because she feels defeated by the dominant male role. ... She is behind the paper because she is oppressed. She may be suffering from postpartum depression after having her child, and this is another reason why she feels trapped like the wall-paper. ... The narrator wants the woman to be free of the paper but does not want to let her go: “I’ve got a rope up her that even Jennie did not find. ... She believes that she must free those women by tearing off the wall-paper.