Christina SerranoFR 127Paper March 14, 2014 “Yellow wallpaper”: a commentary on the roles of women at the end of the 19th centuryThe roles of women within society have radically changed throughout history. Today, women assume relative equality with men in society; women have, among other things, the right to vote, own property, divorce and hold the same jobs. However, before 1919, women were dominated by the largely misogynistic society that existed in the United States; women did not have the right to vote and were not considered equal to men in marriage or otherwise ("women's suffrage"). In the United States, the late 19th century was also a time when society viewed people with mental illness as “a threat to public safety” (Holtzman). Therefore, “people with mental illness were cared for by family members, who discreetly met their needs in rural areas” (Holtzman). These are the conditions in which the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” lived. Described as a “fictionalized autobiographical first-person narrative,” “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman follows the narrator as she is taken to a country house and staged. in rest treatment, instructed by her doctor husband to live in a room with yellow wallpaper (“The Yellow Wallpaper”). Throughout her stay there, the narrator seems to develop a kind of hysteria and sink into a deeper depression than when she arrived. In this historical context, a major question that "The Yellow Wallpaper" raises is whether the narrator is actually ill or whether the illness illustrated in the text is a metaphorical illness that should be understood as a commentary on the oppression of women by the male-dominated society of the time. Due...... middle of paper ......ds shows that the narrator did not have a problem with her husband, but her problem was with society; the narrator knew that her husband only put her on rest treatment because it was the societal norm. That was all he knew. The relationship that the narrator develops with the wallpaper, or rather what she sees inside the wallpaper, is indicative of the idea that she herself is trapped. But that wasn't the only time the concept of entrapment was evident in the story. Much of the language itself, even when the narrator was speaking out loud, consisted of words typically used to describe oppression, death, and entrapment. The reasons mentioned above provide evidence to support the argument that the narrator felt trapped by the chains that society placed on her and that recounting her illness is a symbolic representation of her desire to rebel..