Self-Imposed Limitations, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I think the most intriguing part of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is the strange sense of rationality in the experience the woman has. I could tell the situation was not normal and that she was progressively going insane, but I felt the experience along side the character.  Because the story consists completely of the speaker’s thoughts I was able to get inside of her head and feel her emotions. I was personally invested and desperately wanted to understand her and the underlying meaning to the story.

As the story progressed, it was clear to me that this was a feminist piece of writing. The woman felt anxiety from being trapped, but the source of her entrapment was different from any feminist literature I had read previously.

Originally, the woman feels trapped by her husband and brother. The male influences in her life think that they know what is best and her opinion is not taken into consideration.  So the story starts off with man’s oppression of women—not that original. But the story gets interesting when the antagonist starts comparing the effects of the sun and moon on the wallpaper. Sun, the universal sign for man, causes confusion in the wallpaper, but despite that confusion the woman in the paper is still able to escape into the garden. The moon, the universal sign for womanhood, allows the woman to be seen, but she is trapped behind bars and gets caught when she tries to escape. Under the influence of womanhood, the bars and limitations are more clearly seen, but are also more complete. This poses the interesting thought that maybe it is truly women that halt the progress of their own equality. This is further reinforced when the main character starts casting judgment on the woman who escapes during the day. She says it “must be humiliating to be caught creeping out in the daylight” or in other words it is embarrassing to be in the same realm as men. The main character, when contemplating jumping out of the bars of the window, which mirror the bars in the wallpaper, says she never would because it would be improper. So again, she as a woman is restricting herself from venturing out into equality with men. This idea is finally driven home when at the end of the story the antagonist says that she has escaped despite her husband and “Jane.” Jane is not a character that we have been introduced to, so we can only assume that is the main character’s name. She is accusing herself of being her captor.

I had never thought about this perspective on feminism. Men had the power to constrict women’s rights, but only because the women allowed them to have that power. The women were limiting themselves.

With this story, Gilman reinforced the idea that putting limitations on yourself is the worst thing you can do. It is near impossible to escape self-imposed limitations. This is an idea that I have always held dear, and I think that this is why this story resounded so strongly with me. I really enjoyed this selection because it teaches such a timeless lesson. Readers can still gain much from reading "The Yellow Wall-Paper," making it a true classic.