Lin

This is the yellow wallpaper of the tale, a form of physical constraint by the outside world on the narrator and carrying over into the inner world beyond physical space. As Heidegger would point out, human existence is “thrown” into the world, and any sense of self and others must be “shaped in some way by our environment and social structures.”. In this story, the saturated color of the yellow wallpaper becomes symbolic, referencing the narrator’s “thrownness” into a gendered role and traditionally constructed world.

The wallpaper does more than display material oppression; it also reflects the narrator’s mental distress and confusion. As phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains, the material world and the body are not distinctions, but embedded. The psychological transformation of the narrator is not just a personal subjective process but also conditioned to a large degree by the material and cultural processes of her environment. The wallpaper, therefore, is not just a striking pattern; it is a material representation of the narrator’s body and soul.

The Symbolic Meaning of the Wallpaper

Yellow itself has various symbolic meanings. Yellow, traditionally symbolically speaking, is generally associated with decay, disease, and death and therefore a color that is very much identified with intellectual deterioration and helplessness. Yellow hues and patterns in Deleuze and Guattari’s “anti-symbolism” do not denote static symbols or signifiers but are dynamic and free-flowing, similar to the narrator’s intellect and her constantly changing perceptions. The yellow wallpaper designs are dynamic and polysemous since the narrator’s understanding of them also becomes dynamic. She at first perceives the wallpaper as just aesthetic interference, but when she is under the grip of her worsening mental state, these designs acquire meanings of “captivity” and “constraint.”
The connection between the wallpaper’s patterns and the narrator’s psychological state also shows a central phenomenological idea: the “intentionality of the world.” Human perception is guided by the situation at hand, and this situation simultaneously organizes their way of being. The yellow wallpaper here represents the projection of the narrator’s conscious world. Her psychological pathology is reflected in the distorted, unclear patterns, and therefore her psychological pathology is more deeply involved with societal repercussions.

The Wallpaper as Symbol of Gender Roles
In more in-depth analysis, the wallpaper also assumes an important symbolic value with reference to gender and marriage structures. In the 19th century, women in the family existed largely in roles as “obedient wives” or “loving mothers,” with bodies and minds under domination in marriage and family and with difficulty seeking self-identity. At this point, we may appeal to Michel Foucault’s concept of “power-knowledge” in examining the ways in which the narrator is “treated” and “controlled” by medical and marriage structures of power.

The doctor (narrator’s husband) is one of representatives of an authoritarian regime of knowledge. His practices are more than a physical solution in that they endeavor to “fix” narrator’s mind in conformity with norms governing women. Here, narrator’s crisis is a crisis of more than mere mental illness, that of institutionaled domination over woman’s body and mind. The colors of the yellow wallpaper symbolize the role and fate from which she cannot escape — like a woman ensnared in the limitations of the family, facing an unbreachable and close system.

Conclusion  結論

The Yellow Wallpaper is fundamentally a highly phenomenological tale that interweaves the disintegration of the mind of the narrator with the societal constructs within which she exists, and therefore provides a multi-level metaphor. From the Continental philosophical perspective, the story is not just one of the oppression of women but one of the existential struggle of the modern man in the face of alienation. The yellow wallpaper, as an icon, is not only a symbol of insanity but of the way human beings, under the pressure of material and social forms, begin to lose hold of their existence piecemeal, until they die.