“The Yellow Wallpaper”: Solitary Confinement And Exclusion From Public

Part I of Essay
A major theme in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is that solitary confinement and exclusion from the public results in insanity. The use of imagery and setting helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The unnamed protagonist in this story suffe ....

Part II of Essay
.... (64). Her days and nights are so uneventful that she finds relief in writing a journal which becomes more tiresome as her sickness progresses. In every few paragraphs in her journal, she analyzes the wallpaper. Through the imagery she evokes from the wallpaper, it can be seen that she is really analyzing herself and her illness subconsciously. For example, she begins to see “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (67). She describes her illness (as seen in th ....