What is the short story The Yellow Wallpaper about?

“The Yellow Wallpaper” details the deterioration of a woman’s mental health while she is on a “rest cure” on a rented summer country estate with her family. Her obsession with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom marks her descent into psychosis from her depression throughout the story.

What is the main idea of The Yellow Wallpaper?

Freedom and identity is probably the most important The Yellow Wallpaper’s theme. In the story, John, the husband, puts restrictions on the narrator’s freedom to make her feel better. However, this has the reverse effect, although the physical limitations hurt her less than the emotional ones.

Is The Yellow Wallpaper a true story?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women.

Is The Yellow Wallpaper a short story or novella?

short story
The Yellow Wallpaper is a very long short story, a novella in other words, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late 19th century, and in its greatest part it is autobiographical. Shortly after the birth of her daughter Perkins went through a very serious form of depression.

What does the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper mean?

At the end of the story, as her husband lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband at the expense of her sanity.

What does the woman in the wallpaper represent?

The woman inside of the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator ‘s inner thoughts and insane feelings portrayed as a trapped, hopeless woman. This is because this is how she feels in society, which reflects how many other women felt during this time period as well.

What is the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper?

By the end, the narrator is hopelessly insane, convinced that there are many creeping women around and that she herself has come out of the wallpaper—that she herself is the trapped woman. She creeps endlessly around the room, smudging the wallpaper as she goes.

What is wrong with the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper?

In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the character of Jane to describe the adverse effects of the rest cure. This woman, who goes unnamed for most of the story, is suffering from a mental illness. Most likely, she is suffering from postpartum depression.

How did The Yellow Wallpaper end?

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a Gothic horror story – it ends with the husband taking an axe to the bedroom door where his cowering wife is imprisoned – but the twist is that she has imprisoned herself in her deluded belief that she is protecting her husband from the ‘creeping women’ from behind the wallpaper, and he is …

What was wrong with the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper?