Exploring Images in the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" .
In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates a young woman who allows wallpaper to haunt her. The narrator, or main character, in this story explores her home and events in her daily journal. Gilman creates a story that is only told from one point-of-view, which may be biased. However, when we read this piece of fiction, we piece the information together to allow us to visualize that the woman is indeed insane, for she tells the readers that there are images in the yellow wallpaper, which can represent and symbolize the character or the character's view of her life.
Gilman describes many unique images in this piece of literature. Gilman's choice for words in the story allows the audience to picture the images as they read. For instance, the eyes may represent how she feels in her home, perhaps like someone is constantly watching her. These eyes as if they "stare at you upside down" (Gilman 597). She believes that the wallpaper "looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had" (Gilman 597). The narrator describes these eyes as if the wallpaper is stalking her. She says, "absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere" (Gilman 597). The narrator allows this pair of eyes to make her feel like she cannot get away from the room and the wallpaper: as if they never go away, "all up and .
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down the line, one a little higher than the other" (Gilman 597). She refers to the paper as being "dull enough to confuse the eye in following" (Gilman 596). These "unblinking" eyes also terrify her to allow her to believe that she is trapped in her own house. .
Many of these images symbolize the narrator as feeling trapped or imprisoned. The narrator feels as if her husband and home in several ways trap her. The house that John decides to take her to is isolated "standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village" (Gilman 595).
