"The Yellow Wallpaper"

In her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolically portrays women's treatment and confinement by men in the nineteenth century. Gilman wrote the account more than one hundred years ago, driven directly by her own personal experiences of having to face the male-dominated society she lived in. The female narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is suffering from a "temporary nervous condition," which is essentially depression. Right in the beginning, she states, "John [her …

…demonstrating the discovery of feminism by society. The character of Jane is not identified - it could be John's mistress or the submissive side of the narrator herself - but symbolically she represents part of the restraint that had led the narrator to insanity. By tearing down the wallpaper and later seeing her husband "inexplicably" faint, the woman lets the images out and sets herself free, and thus feminism is also exposed to the world.