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Yellow Wallpaper Archetypes Essay

The document is an essay analyzing the archetypes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". It discusses how the main character progresses from an innocent, submissive housewife to an outlaw and eventually a hero. As an innocent at the start, she is dismissed by her husband. Being confined to a room with yellow wallpaper drives her to seeming madness, representing her desire to escape social constraints. By the end, her "insanity" allows her to overcome her husband, showing her transformation into an independent woman and hero. The essay argues Gilman effectively used these archetypes to portray the struggles of women seeking more opportunities and suffrage through the character's journey.

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321 views2 pages

Yellow Wallpaper Archetypes Essay

The document is an essay analyzing the archetypes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". It discusses how the main character progresses from an innocent, submissive housewife to an outlaw and eventually a hero. As an innocent at the start, she is dismissed by her husband. Being confined to a room with yellow wallpaper drives her to seeming madness, representing her desire to escape social constraints. By the end, her "insanity" allows her to overcome her husband, showing her transformation into an independent woman and hero. The essay argues Gilman effectively used these archetypes to portray the struggles of women seeking more opportunities and suffrage through the character's journey.

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api-552775147
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Nathan Fairbanks

Mrs. Lott

Yellow Wallpaper essay

21 January, 2021

The Yellow Wallpaper Archetypes essay

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a late nineteenth century writer and women's suffragist.

She was born in 1860 in Connecticut, shortly after the birth of her daughter she fell into a deep

depression (postpartum depression).throughout her life she was known for her writing and

activism. At age 75 she developed breast cancer and committed suicide by chloroform overdose.

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by author; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she uses the shifting

character archetypes of innocent to outlaw and eventual hero, to reveal the constrictions and

societal views of women and dismantles them.

At the beginning of the story the narrator is portrayed as an innocent submissive

housewife. Her submissive nature is shown when she expresses doubts about her new living

arrangement but her husband “laughs at [her]”(1). This is used to develop her initial behaviors

and treatment. It helps to show the great contrast between the beginning and end of the story. She

believes she is ill but her husband says otherwise (a physician) and she wonders “what can one

do”(1). This further builds up her submissiveness not just as a wife but patient. This further

stacks the “authority” against her. The narrator's position as a submissive housewife helps

contrast the change she later undergoes.

After being put into the room with the yellow wallpaper it is then the narrator starts to

lose their mind and form into more of an outlaw archetype. She first starts to “cry at nothing and
cry most the time” and is “alone a great deal now”(3). This helps to build her slow descent into

madness. However her derangement is symbolic to how from the man's point of view she is

going crazy, it really means she is starting to realize her position and seek freedom. She later

starts to believe she herself has come out of the wallpaper and thinks that “so many creeping

women…[have] come out of that wallpaper” as she had. Her belief of being in the wallpaper

represents her acce[tance of her role in society, becoming part of the room as so many other

women have. However her escape represents her willingness and wanting for more and to be part

of the room and not just an outlier. The narrator's development as an outlaw builds her actual

escape from society's constraints and development towards an independent woman.

The narrator ends the story as the hero. Her ‘insanity’ eventually leads to her husband

fainting, a stereotypical feminine trait, and she then triumphantly walks “creep[s] over him”(8).

The narrator ends the story as the hero because what was perceived as insanity by the ‘authority

figures’ was really representative of the woman's desire to escape a submissive and motherly

focused role. Her downward spiral is what men at the time thought of women’s want for more

than a simple caretaker, women's suffrage. Her acceptance of her role to her then freedom from

it, represented by becoming part of and then escaping the yellow wallpaper, shows her

transformation from mother of olden times to activist and feminist of a new age.

The symbolism of the suffrage movement and how it was viewed is excellently portrayed

through the use of innocent, outlaw and hero archetypes, depicting the societal view of women

wanting more opportunities, and the struggles they went through to get them. Gilmans figurative

approach to showing the battle dismantles the beliefs and views of women at the time.

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