Charlotte Perkins Gilman is famous for the multiple pieces of writing that she published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and for the feminist overtones present in many of them. In one of her most famous short stories The Yellow Wallpaper, she employs metaphors surrounding a woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper of a nursery to represent the narrator escaping the cage that her husband placed around her. 

Gilman first uses metaphorical language surrounding color to exhibit the similarities between the narrator and the woman in the yellow wallpaper. Gilman describes how “in the very bright spots [the woman in the yellow wallpaper] keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through” (Gilman 14). Here, the woman is imprisoned in the wallpaper, and no matter how hard she tries, she cannot free herself from the constraints of the walls. Through the usage of “shady spots” as the place where the woman attempts to break free, Gilman simultaneously links color and entrapment together and describes how bright colors such as yellow are a prison, while the dark and the shade represent freedom. Gilman then establishes a double lens between the narrator and the woman in the wallpaper when she uses the same language to describe the narrator. Gilman describes how “By daylight [the woman in the wallpaper] is subdued, quiet”, and a few pages later, the narrator describes how the housekeeper tells her husband that “I sleep a good deal in the daytime” (Gilman 12; 15). In this way, she establishes the similarities between the two women and shows how bright, yellow daylight keeps them sedated and imprisoned.

Gilman’s use of metaphor during the emancipation of the woman in the yellow wallpaper and the narrator further highlights their similarities. By the end, the narrator and the woman are not just separate entities trapped in the same house, but the same person in the eyes of the narrator. The narrator describes how “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (Gilman 16). Here, the destruction of the wallpaper that was trapping the woman inside of it is concurrent to the emancipation of the narrator, who stops following her husband’s orders. By mixing the pronouns “I” and “she”, readers mix the two characters up in their minds and begin to see them as one. Ultimately, the narrator views herself and the woman in the yellow wallpaper as the same, stating that “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” (Gilman 17). This double lens allows the reader to view the narrator’s journey to freedom through not just her viewpoint, but through the journey that the woman in the wallpaper undergoes. Without the journey of both the woman in the yellow wallpaper and the narrator, the nuances of their fight for freedom would be invisible since the negative mental impacts of this imprisonment—which the reader experiences through the narrator’s slow descent into madness and her realization that she is one with the woman in the yellow wallpaper—would not be in the story.

Gilman’s creation of this complex metaphor allows not only for the story to become more nuanced, but for the struggles that the narrator undergoes to become that much more poignant when they are not just seen harming the narrator, but the secondary woman in the yellow wallpaper. Thus, the destruction of the wallpaper not only symbolizes her freedom but the freedom of the narrator too.

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. Bantam Classic, 2006.

Neubaeur, Jennifer. Personal Interview, 22 March 2021.