Literary Devices Used In The Yellow Wallpaper

However, the biggest element used in the work is symbolism. It is very easy to simply take the events for what they are, but to get a true understanding of the plot, one must look deeper into things. The true meaning is about women and their role in a male driven society and the depression that can be connected with that. The wallpaper represents the social norms that every woman feels trapped behind, which is why the narrator sees cage bars in the pattern. While the woman inside of the wallpaper simply represents herself, as well as, many other women that have undergone the same fate.

literary devices used in the yellow wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a young woman who got locked in a disgusting room. Being in an unstable mental state, the narrator spent three months in isolation. Her husband decided that lockdown is the best way to overcome the tough postpartum period. Thus, the young woman spent the entire summer lying in a bed and viewing the irritating yellow wallpaper. The isolation even deepened the depression. The woman was seeking freedom. Yet, she did not achieve it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents her main character in the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a young weak unnamed woman descent into madness from an undiagnosed illness. Before her entrapment, the narrator shows distinct symptoms that she was experiencing schizophrenic. He loving husband, John, is repressing and places her in seclusion owning to recuperate her hallucination but she begins to show clear signs of insanity. This paper will track the trajectory of the main character's nervous breakdown to demonstrate Gilman's application of literary devices; the point of view, symbolism, and tone. The discussion will show the narrator's journey as she descent into insanity showing the author's application of literary devices to arrest the reader's understanding of her perception and attitude towards the whole account.

The heightening of her deteriorating mental sanity, the author depicts her point of view to show how isolation impacted the drive to insanity. Enclosing the narrator in the large airy bedroom in the colonial mansion leaves her limited options to escape lurid contemplation. According to the author's point of view in describing the room's properties played considerable contribution to driving the narrator into insanity. The representation of the colonial mansion shows the dictatorial history attached to the house where the narrator is confined. The text objectivity of the room's yellow wallpaper shows the contribution of these properties display the symptoms of paranoia, hallucination and false impression of greatness leading to extreme mental illness. When exploring these considerations the author tries to persuade her readers on her objective perception that the situation the narrator finds herself in, contributes to her insanity. The text emphasizes that the protagonist was ill at the onset of the narration but the conditions she suffers leads to her extreme madness. In Gilman's effort to show her point of view on the contribution of the situation she lives in takes her to madness, the narrator states "I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin... and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions....." The author's houses the perception that the protagonist destroys her life due to self-denial and foreshadowing thoughts. In this note, the author demonstrates the narrator's weakness and hallucinating nature were the contributing factors to her distorted mental state. The narrator's husband, John, is perceived by the text to neglect his wife and a considerable cataract to her deteriorating mental illness. When the text says that "...imaginative power and habit of story-making...." Signifies that the husband was not convinced from the word go that she was hysterical. According to the author, the husband being a physician indicated that she has slight depression shows that the initial stages she suffered from depression and was not insane at the start of the narration.

The protagonist's imagination contributed to the large driver of her mental distortion. When her husband recommends confinement to forbid her from participating in any creative thinking the symbolic imaginative ability shows the patterns of her figurative contribution to madness. When her husband tells her that "a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency, so I try." The prohibition of the narrator from exploring her imaginative thoughts gives her enough room to occupy her new image with the yellow wallpaper that was a representation of the new surrounding contributes to confusing her suppressed feeling further. The metaphor use of imagination as the contributor to the narrator's drive from nervous uncertainty to extreme madness shows the author's representational signification of the contribution of the mind to give the narrator the reason to engage in a hallucination. Being trapped in the isolation room the narrator's emotional distress is overpowered by the loneliness that engages her with concrete thoughts that focuses on provocative irritation. The author successfully demonstrates the active contribution of the narrator's imaginative power to drive her into insanity.

In conclusion, the Gilman makes considerable efforts to show how the protagonist moves from simple nervous breakdown to extreme insanity. The author's application of literary devices makes considerable efforts to convince the reader on the different phases suffered by the main character from hallucination to madness.