Creating A Response Essay On The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892 that is still considered a sensation. It delves on the enormous powers of the brain to adapt to the situation and constrict itself. The main character Jane becomes a lunatic through the passage of the story.

The various streams

While writing a response essay, you may take various streams. The one clear figment is a take on the lack of freedom for women in those times. They were often restricted to one room and slowly their mindset would also become parochial in the classic ‘Fog in the well; syndrome.

The other stream is liberation in bondage. Here is a brilliant exposition of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Jane, trapped by the yellow wallpaper; its color and fumes and expressions, ultimately falls in love with it even as she tears it to release hypothetical women trapped therein. Clearly, the story has too many layers.

Impact of surroundings

You should lineate on how a person starts getting shaped and mutated by his immediate surroundings. A miserly home has close-ended people; an adulterous household has people who hold free thoughts about sex. Likewise, the recuperating Jane, shut in a room full of barred windows, cannot see an orifice other than the yellow wallpaper and is trapped by its essence.

You can also pontificate on how the mind plays games with us. Often, what we see is not what we should believe in. In this light, it is hard to assert whether this story is a tragedy or not; for Jane ends up happy. The trait is very much evident in Rebecca; a character f 100 years of Solitude.

An open revolt

The story is also an open revolt against the aspersions cast in those times on women writers and the restrictions imposed on creativity. The women Jane sees trapped in the yellow wallpaper are actually those people who want to create; those people who want to lead a wishful life. Unfortunately, those women don’t exist in what is a masterstroke of the writer.

Your essay will largely end up recommending the story to readers. You should make your own notes on the veracity and poignancy of the story and its relevance even in today’s times. You can glorify the book’s clinical English, fluid script; smart narration and incredible storyline.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a creative pearl. Then again, pearls are also trapped in oyster shells. Here is talking about an existent allegory.