EXPRESSIVE MEANS AND STYLISTIC DEVICES

In order to portray the characters, to describe the setting and to reveal the main idea of the story convincingly the author resorts to some devices.

One should say that Charlotte Perkins Gilman brilliantly uses lexical means, namely situational, dramatic and verbal irony, personification, epithets,  metaphor and simile, to describe in a precise way the events of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and to create vivid images.

Proceeding to the syntactical devices, there are a lot of  rhetorical questions and exclamation marks, parallelism, antithesis,  asyndeton, polysyndeton and asyndeton.

Phonetic devices are presented, first of all, by alliteration, which aims at imparting a melodic effect to the utterance, and assonances.

As for the graphic devices, the role of the hyphen is extremely important in the story.Apart from this, to stress the most important words by giving them a sort of  special coloring, reveal the personality of the main character, draw readers’ attention to the most crucial part of the extract and describe the setting in a descent way, Charlotte Perkins makes use of italics.