Let's get acquainted with the characters

Characters

Narrator (Jane): A young woman suffering from a nervous disorder because she has no outlet for her active and highly creative mind. Near the end of the story, she speaks of a woman named Jane in an apparent reference to herself.  
John: Narrator's husband, a physician. He prescribes rest therapy for his wife even though it is inactivity that unnerves her. He forbids her to engage in any kind of activity, including her favorite pastime, writing. Unfortunately, she follows his orders without protest. 
Narrator's Brother: He supports John in his approach to the narrator's treatment.  
Jennie: John's sister, the housekeeper.  
Baby: Child of the narrator and John. 
Mary: Baby's nanny.  
Henry, Julia: Relatives of the narrator and John. 
Mother, Nellie, Children: Characters whom the narrator mentions without providing additional information. 

Things to remeber

TONE · The narrator is in a state of anxiety for much of the story, with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation—a tone Gilman wants the reader to share

THEMES · The subordination of women in marriage; the importance of self-expression

SYMBOLS · The wallpaper

The plot of the story and types of speech employed in it

From the point of view of presentation the text is 1^st person narrative. As the main character’s fictional journal, the story focuses exclusively on her own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Everything that we learn or see in the story is filtered through the narrator’s shifting consciousness, and since the narrator goes insane over the course of the story, her perception of reality is often completely at odds with that of the other characters.

The types of speech employed by the author of the analyzed extract are mixture of narration, description, meditation and dialogue.

I believe that the plot grows out of a conflict that is an external struggle between the main character and her husband, the circumstances she lives in, over the nature and treatment of her illness leads to a conflict within the narrator’s mind between her growing understanding of her own powerlessness and her desire to repress this awareness.

The plot of the story runs as follows:

                     Exposition (we get to know about the main characters and the mansion they rent for summer);

                     The development of the plot (the author shows us her ‘gray days’ in the mansion and we get to know about protagonist’s postpartum depression and whose illness gives her insight into her (and other women’s) situation in society and in marriage). Here we may speak also about rising action (The narrator decides to keep a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gradually intensifies into obsession);

                     The climax (The narrator completely identifies herself with the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper). Here takes place falling action (The narrator, now completely identified with the woman in the wallpaper, spends her time crawling on all fours around the room);

                     The denouement (Her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, right over his fallen body).

The setiing of the story

The events in the analyzed text take place in the late 1800s in an upstairs room of a mansion rented for the summer by the narrator and her husband. The setting of the events in the given extract is realistic and fantastic at the same time. It is presented in a specific way. It provides a background for action and contributes to our understanding of the characters and embodies the main idea. The author makes use of great variety of epithets and metaphors in order to describe the mansion, especially the room the protagonist spends her time.

After reading more and more times

It must be noted, that The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health. The Yellow Wallpaper examines the role of women in 19th-century American society, including the relationship between husbands and wives, the economic and social dependence of women on men, and the repression of female individuality and sexuality.
After reading this short story for 3 times, I can say that it is worth spending your time. Without a doubt, every woman should read it in order to see that our society has really changed and women and men are equal. It is not as it was in 18 or 19 century. We don't have such problems nowadays. We are free to do what we want. Moreover, the author also touches upon such themes as:

·        Freedom and Confinement

·        Madness

·        Gender

·        Literature and Writing

·        Society and Class

I believe that James Brown's song " It's a man's world" is a good example of changes in our world beginning from the middle of the 19th century

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The most prominent social scientist and feminist

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer, lecturer, social critic and feminist, lived at a time of tremendous upheaval in this country's history.  "She used her energies and her gifts in an effort to understand the world and her place in it and to extend that knowledge and those insights to others". Thus, although she was never trained in the methods of social science research and critique, Gilman should be recognized for her contribution to our knowledge in this area in addition to her recognition as an utopian author and a feminist.

In order to understand Charlotte Perkins Gilman as writer and intellectual, we must first know something of her personal life. 

 Her writings, both fictional and non-fictional, still offer a critique of society that still ring true in today's structure. In her work, Gilman dedicated herself to raising the standard of life for women of her time by deconstructing institutions such as the home and the economy through her non-fiction and by creating new worlds for women in her fiction. 

In short, Gilman was advocating a revolution of sorts similar to that urged earlier by Marx to workers, but Gilman's focus was on women. She recognized the inequalities inherent in the structure of the working world which excluded women from most jobs, relegating them to the world of the home where they worked from sunrise to sunset, their only compensation being the roof over their heads. 

Through her Utopian fiction, Gilman described the kind of world she envisioned for women. 

Thus through popular fiction as well as intellectual writing and speaking, Gilman attempted to reach a wide variety of people with her social commentaries, especially women, in an attempt to awaken them to her revolutionary ideas. These concepts continue to intrigue feminists in the social sciences as can be attested by her inclusion in many books on early feminism and her inclusion in women's studies courses. Although she was well known in her time, her radical ideas failed to truly take root. With the "third-wave" of feminism now working for many of the same social changes Gilman advocated, her life and work are an inspiration to feminists young and old.

THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born on 3 July, 1860 in the New England town of Hartford, Connecticut. She was the daughter of Mary Fitch Westcott and librarian and writer Frederick Beecher Perkins. 

In 1884 she married fellow artist Charles Walter Stetson (1858-1911) with whom she had a daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson (b.1885). Her ensuing depression, possibly post-partum, and nervous breakdown affected her for years to come. Gilman went to a sanitorium in Philadelphia in 1887 where she was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who is the doctor in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. His `rest cure’ included no physical or intellectual stimulation and he roundly forbade Gilman to write, suggesting she `live as domestic a life as possible’.

Rejecting this harsh pronouncement, Gilman moved to California around 1888 after also separating from her husband, and became involved with social reform and feminist groups, conducting lectures in North America and the United Kingdom on various subjects as trade unions and women’s suffrage. She also had articles published in the New England Magazine. The Giant Wistaria (1891) was followed by “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and In This Our World (1893) a collection of her poems.

In 1896 Gilman was living in Chicago, Illinois where she continued to write and associate with numerous other pioneering women of social reform including Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, founders of the settlement house `Hull House’. Gilman’s Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898) became a best seller which was translated into several different languages and highly lauded internationally, making her one of the few commercially successful women writers of the time. In 1900 she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman (who died suddenly in 1934), a lawyer in New York city.

Concerning Children (1900) was followed by The Home: Its Work and Influence(1903). Gilman was also busy writing for and publishing her own monthly journalThe Forerunner from 1909-1916. What Diantha Did (1910), Suffrage Song and Verses (1911), The Man Made World or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), andMoving the Mountain (1911) were followed by Herland (1915). It is the utopian tale of three male explorers who discover an all-female society, free of war, poverty, and oppressive domination. With Her in Ourland (1916) followed. Gilman also wrote His Religion and Hers in 1923.

In 1932 Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer and by 1934 had moved back to California. She died by an overdose of chloroform on 17 August, 1935. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935). In 1994 Gilman was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York.