¶ … Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled "The Yellow Wallpaper." The best way to evaluate this essay is by identifying the various thematic elements prevalent in it. These include the waning sanity of the protagonist, the intransigence of her husband, and the subjection of women to the will of men that typified the lives of women at the time that this story was written. Such an evaluation will most likely end in a conclusion that Gilman was subtly protesting the noxious effect that men have on the lives of women, particularly husbands' own wives, as a salient social issue.
There are several passages in this work of literature in which it is clear that the author is suffering from some sort of mental illness -- or, perhaps more accurately, is recovering from one and is attempting to prevent a relapse. Part of her mental illness, the author alludes to, stems from her prowess as a writer. There are passages within this work when the protagonist alludes to the fact that she used to imagine things as a child -- which more than likely connects with her work as a writer. However, it is clear that due to their circumstances the protagonist finds herself in -- largely bedridden in a room in which she abhors the wallpaper -- that her sanity is adversely affected. She initially has a feeling of foreboding about the wallpaper, which eventually transforms into craziness. Whereas earlier in the story she believed that she could see a woman moving about in it, later on near the end of...
This passage denotes that the protagonist believes that like the other women she has imagined coming from the wallpaper, she did too. Considering such a notion in the context of writing a story is using one's imagination creatively. Considering such a notion seriously shows that one is going crazy, which is what happens to the protagonist.
The stubbornness of the husband, John, of the protagonist is amazing, and appears to be directly attributable to her slowly slipping sanity. For the protagonist, John is much more than a husband -- he is her physician, her dictator, her master, and the one who truly seals her fate (Caruso, 2007). Virtually the first thing the narrator explains about her husband is the fact that "he does not believe" (Gilman, 2008) that she is ill, which carries some degree of rectitude for the simple fact that he is a formally trained medical doctor. However, there are a number of instances in this tale in which the protagonist's husband directly ignores and overrides her own concerns about her health and the house that she and her husband are staying in. He will not let her pick what room will be hers (even though it is her room!), he will not let her write (forcing her to sneak and hide the fact that she is doing it), and will not let her leave the house even when she explicitly asks her too…
