Charlotte Perkins Gilman Stetson is a woman who grew up in the 19th century where women only lived in a domestic sphere. She was married to Walter Stetson for about two years before they separated due to Charlotte’s illness. After giving birth to her daughter Katharine Stetson “Began to experience increasing, melancholy, depression and fatigue” (O’Brien 2). Her doctors treated her by using isolation and they wouldn’t let her write. Her illness and her journey to being well is what gave her inspiration to write her story “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Gilman’s uses diction, symbolism, and Irony in her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to portray how women were treated in the 19th century. Gilman uses diction to describe how the room she has been isolated in. She uses words like unclean, sickly, and atrocious to describe how the wallpaper looks. These words also describe how her isolation makes her feel. “I should hate it myself if I had to live here long” (Stetson 3). John treats her as if she’s not sick, just that she has “hysterical tendency” (Steston 2). In the 19th century is was common for men to look over their wives because men were the dominate spouse. So, for john to be her husband …show more content…
The women in the wallpaper symbolizes faith being trapped inside of this this life she is being forced to live in. Faith mentions in the story that she has “caught him several times looking at the wall paper” (Gilman 7). She began to try and figure out who this woman was even more aggressively than before because she doesn’t want John or Jennie too. This symbolizes how John look at faiths illness he can see that there something wrong with her, but he does nothing to really help her. “John’s attempts to cure his wife are super rational and as structured as he is” (Seuss 8). This is how the story portrays that women were not given the attention that they should been in the 19th