Historical Horror
Answer: This real 19th-century treatment inspired Gilman’s critique of women’s medical oppression. It focused on isolation, exercise, and doing no work at all until one improved.
Question: What is the Rest Cure?
Jane’s husband’s profession makes his oppression especially ironic.
What is physician/doctor?
Repetition of “What is one to do?” demonstrates this rhetorical device.
What is epiphora?
This room symbolizes Jane’s domestic imprisonment.
What is the nursery?
Jane initially sees the wallpaper as merely this.
What is ugly/repellent?
Answer: This diagnosis was often weaponized against women experiencing postpartum depression or emotional distress and its root stems from the notion that the uterus in women was what made them unstable, mad, and irrational creatures
What is hysteria?
John frequently calls Jane this, reducing her autonomy through infantilization and reducing her to either an object of animal.
What is “little girl” (or similar pet names)?
The wallpaper itself functions primarily as this type of literary device.
What is symbolism?
This part of the bedroom represents confinement/imprisonment, turning the room into a prison cell.
What are the barred windows?
Jane eventually believes this is trapped behind the wallpaper.
What is a woman?
Answer: Gilman’s story exposes this Victorian social system as the true source of Jane’s suffering as her husband, brother, and all men in a collective form oppress women.
What is patriarchy?
This literary device is present when John, a healer, becomes Jane’s greatest harm.
What is situational irony?
Jane’s perspective creates uncertainty through this narrative technique.
What is unreliable narrator/first-person POV?
What figure in history could we compare the narrator's experience to if we discussed the nailed-down bed as a representation of how she suffers for all those women who suffer too?
Who is Jesus?
Jane’s obsession with the wallpaper mirrors this psychological process.
What is mental deterioration/descent into insanity?
This psychiatrist is alluded to in the story as a threat and was the real life therapist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Who is Weir Mitchell?
This action signifies the unnamed narrator finally over powering her husband, using him as a barrier to jump over on her way to control of her own life by embracing who she really is.
What is crawling over his passed out body?
Gilman uses this device when beautiful domestic imagery masks imprisonment as the home's exterior is meant to convey the superficial appearance of her marriage while the inner dwelling of the house, dark, dingy, and empty is a true representation of the partnership between the narrator and John.
What is extended metaphor?
The sun often symbolizes this oppressive force and the power men wield over women, while the moon and night time are much more aligned with the female cycle and power of woman hood. What method is this?
Pathetic Fallacy
The short story is told through a series of these rather than the typical narrative structure?
A series of diary entries
This was the specific decade in which the story takes place?
At the end, Jane reverses power by referring to John with this infantilizing phrase, signally a reversal in power roles.
What is “young man”?
The sentence reversal in Jane’s final transformation is this device when she says "I pulled and she shook, she shook and I pulled"
What is chiasmus?
The moon represents this contrasting force.
What is female freedom/awakening/empowerment?
Jane tears down the wallpaper primarily to achieve this.
What is liberation (or perceived liberation)?