Imagine you were forced to stay in a room for three months, and while you are in that room, you are only visited periodically by two people. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this nightmare becomes a reality. “The Yellow Wallpaper” records the events that happen through this story in journal entries from the narrator’s point of view. The events in “The Yellow Wallpaper” follow a standard plot format. As a result of that, the plot structure in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is simple and easy to follow. This makes the story a very interesting read. The exposition in “The Yellow Wallpaper” occurs at the beginning of the story. This story starts off introducing the narrator and her husband- John, who works as a physician. …show more content…
The three months that they have spent at the house are almost up, and once John gets back, they plan to soon leave. Unbeknownst to John, the narrator has different plans. The night that John was gone, Jennie wanted to sleep in the same room as the narrator to keep an eye on her, but the narrator refused, saying:”...I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.” (Gilman 319). Jennie reluctantly agrees, and that night as the narrator was once again watching the wall, she noticed something: “As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.” (Gilman 319). The narrator tries to rip up the wallpaper all night long, and by morning she had pulled off a considerable amount of wallpaper. The next morning Jennie comes into the room and believes the narrator when she says: “...I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.” (Gilman 319) while trying to explain herself. Then the narrator tells Jeannie that she wants to sleep all she can, and not to wake her even for dinner, as she would call when she woke. Jennie listens to her, and the narrator is left all alone. The narrator springs into action, locks the door, and throws the key out of the window. After the narrator throws the key out the window, she grabs a section of rope she had hidden because she wants to “catch” the women. Once she gets the rope out, she continues to rip up more and more of the yellow
Only the charwoman goes near him. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator feels trapped by her husband and physician, John, because he is controlling and believes he knows what is best for her. The woman that the narrator sees in the wallpaper is eventually revealed to be
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.
The narrator is a woman who is imaginative trying to make her mind think and realize the meaning of the yellow wallpaper. She describes the wallpaper as, “repellant, almost revolting; smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (Gilman 641). This specific wallpaper makes the narrator feel a certain way. At first, she does not like the color or how it looks. But then not having anything else to do in the room, she starts examining the wallpaper.
Gilman shows the progression of the main character’s insanity through the woman in the wallpaper, John, and the bed. Like most individuals, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” gradually shows increased symptoms of insanity. She begins the summer as a sane individual. As time progresses, she starts acting
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, Jane, has postpartum depression. In order to cure this depression, John, Jane’s husband and a doctor, administer the rest treatment on her. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her personal experience. Along with writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” she wrote an explanation for why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that was written in first person during 1892. This story depicts society’s attitude towards women with a mental illness at that time. Ultimately, the story shows how women were treated in the 19th century. “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.
The narrator leads a fairly boring life. The only thing she seems to do all day is sleep, write, eat, look out the window and study the yellow wallpaper in her room. Evidence of this in the story is “I lie here on this great immovable bed - it is nailed down, I believe - and follow that pattern about by the hour” (Gilman 650). Another piece of evidence would be, “The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman 649).
Secondly, throughout the story, the narrator describes seeing an evolving woman trapped inside of the wall. Although readers can assume that this woman is merely a product of the narrator’s mind, the woman can also be seen as a symbol of the narrator and her feelings of being trapped. Eventually, the woman in the wall aids the narrator in her escape. In conclusion, many elements of the narrator’s increasing madness throughout The Yellow Wallpaper contributed to her freedom from the confines of the room, the confines of society, and the confines of her
However, in stories such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s point of view is what truly helps define the setting and symbolism. Without the narrator’s distinct point of view on how she
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.
The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.
By the end of the story the narrator was incredibly disassociated and has convinced herself that she freed herself from the wallpaper by tearing it off of the wall and that she shall be able to creep around the house no matter what John and Jennie try to do to "put her back in the wallpaper". She believes she has won her freedom, when she has only imprisoned herself inside of her own
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, both female protagonists are faced with opposing male forces that seek to control, undermine and take advantage of them. However, in the midst of the challenges and subordination they face from these dominant male figures, each protagonists independence is tested as they both strive to overcome these forces. Connie, the protagonist in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is a 15 year old, narcissistic teenage girl, searching for independence through her sexuality as she enters into the realm of adulthood. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home,” (Oates, 1).
The house is in a super-isolated place. The house represents the narrator 's personal emotions; restricted and isolation. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the symbolism of the the wallpaper and the diary demonstrate the psychological difficulties, that were caused by being disrespected and thought less of, during the 19th century for women across the United States. In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman 's husband John neglects her symptoms of postpartum and says she has a slight hysterical tendency.
The narrator convinces herself that there is a woman trapped in the paper who is trying to get out (Perkins 385). She also claims that the woman behind the paper shakes it in hopes to escape (Perkins 388). The narrator becomes obsessed with the ghostly woman, who is in the paper, and convinces herself that she too was once trapped in the paper and escaped. The narrator is determined to catch the creeping woman. She believes that there are others who are trapped in the wallpaper by night and are free during the day.