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Women and Space: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Narrator Liberating Herself From a Male Dominated Society Space plays an important role in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. In this work the space is the narrator’s bedroom; the room which she is forced to stay in. The room has made the narrator develop the way she has. The room began as her prison, but eventually led to her liberation. The horridness of the wallpaper made her realize that she was trapped. The narrator is stuck in a male dominated society and is searching for ways to free herself. This is an idea that is held in many works by women, “In literature by women, women characters are found to be outsiders, yet locked into tarnished enclosures, colonized or romantically imprisoned” (Shands 1). The bedroom is the narrator’s prison in the beginning of the story. It represents the controlling nature of the males in her life. She was forced to stay in the room by her husband who happens to be a physician. She is the submissive wife who feels there is nothing she can do about her situation, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?” (Gilman 833). She is put in this room to “rest” and get better. She knows she is trapped in this society, but is not ready to admit this. The narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and the room. As the story develops the narrator realizes the bars lining the wallpaper, “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars” (Gilman 840). The bars only come out at night because that is when John is there. The narrator begins to see the control he has over her during the night.
Approximate Word count = 1277
Approximate Pages = 5.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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