At the end of the story, the narrator believes that the woman has come out of the wallpaper. This indicates that the narrator has finally merged fully into her psychosis, and become one with the house and domesticated discontent.
The irony is in the fact that the room the woman must live in, that was once a child's nursery, acts like a prison or mental institution, as she is not allowed to leave the room and the room is mostly bare. "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore.
Gilman tries to show how men dominate the marriage institution, but in the end, what is displayed is the ways women are weak and let men control them.
Dramatic irony is used extensively in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” For example, when the narrator first describes the bedroom John has chosen for them, she attributes the room's bizarre features—the “rings and things” in the walls, the nailed-down furniture, the bars on the windows, and the torn wallpaper—to the fact that ...
toneThe narrator is in a state of anxiety for much of the story, with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation—a tone Gilman wants the reader to share. tenseThe story stays close to the narrator's thoughts at the moment and is thus mostly in the present tense.
The yellow wallpaper in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a symbol of society and patriarchy. It is ugly, faded, and torn in some spots, and a figure of a woman is trapped in the paper. It symbolizes women, or the woman in the story, being trapped within the constraints of a patriarchal society.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women.
The woman inside of the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator 's inner thoughts and insane feelings portrayed as a trapped, hopeless woman. This is because this is how she feels in society, which reflects how many other women felt during this time period as well.
Gilman's short story is a straightforward one. The narrator is brought by her physician husband to a summer retreat in the countryside to recover from her “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” utilizes imagery, characterization, and personification to show the struggle of a mentally ill woman during the 19th century. The first and most obvious literary device used by Gilman is imagery.
A short story set in New England in the 1880s; published in 1892. A woman suffering from depression is subjected to a “Rest Cure.” Relegated to an isolated country house and forbidden to work or exercise, she goes insane.
There are many examples of dramatic irony in literature, movies, television and fairy tales. Some examples include: A woman thinks her boyfriend is acting strangely because he's about to propose, but the audience knows that he is planning to run away with another woman, intensifying emotions.
Almost every aspect of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is ironic in some way. Irony is a way of using words to convey multiple levels of meaning that contrast with or complicate one another.
An “epistolary” work of fiction takes the form of letters between characters. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a kind of epistolary story, in which the narrator writes to herself. Gilman uses this technique to show the narrator’s descent into madness both subjectively and objectively—that is, from both the inside and the outside.