There is a setting in every book or story. Certain settings can sometimes play a big part, while others play an irrelevant one. Settings can occasionally cause the characters in your book to change.It depends on the story because every story is different. Setting can contribute to the meaning and success of stories as well. In the Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper the setting is a big part of the story. The setting of the Yellow Wallpaper is so important to the story that it not only plays as big of a role as the main character, it changes the main character herself throughout the book. (is that a thesis???) The Yellow Wallpaper takes place in an ancestral hall located in the countryside during the summer. As you progress further into …show more content…
She notices how the patterns look like a women creeping behind the wallpaper. Soon she is staying up all night, unable to sleep due to the wallpaper. As soon as the moonlight shines upon the paper she begins thinking about the women she believes is hiding in the paper. She says,” The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”(532) The wallpaper is affecting her mental state. She really believes that there is a living human being trying to escape from the wallpaper. Once her husband mentions that they only have three more weeks at the house the narrator is determined to solve the wallpaper before then. She believes that the women is being held inside the paper because the pattern is bars that are trapping her in. The main character has become so obsessed with the wallpaper that she doesn’t even sleep anymore all she does is study the wallpaper. In the beginning of the book she could barely stand to look at the wallpaper and now she is sacrificing sleep to stare at it for hours on end. At the start of this book the main character was a calm women who had a case of the “nervous troubles”, now she has become some women that is obsessed with the women she believes is living behind the paper. You could say that she has gone …show more content…
Now she has started to take notice of how the wallpaper smells. She describes it as “peculiar” and she can not escape it because everywhere in the house she goes the odor follows her, like the wallpaper does. She admits to having thought of burning down the house to get rid of the smell. This is when the change became blatantly visible. She says,” Though watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move- and no wonder! The women behind shakes it!”(534) Next she admits that she thinks the women escapes from the wallpaer during the day because she has seen her roaming around the house, like a ghost. She decides that she wants to help the women by freeing her because what she doesn't realize is that the women “trapped” behind the paper is her. She is trapped with her husband who treats her as if she were a child. So with to days left in her visit she begins to tear off the wallpaper little by little so her husband won’t notice. On the last day is when she changes the most. She locks herself in the room and tears off the wallpaper completely. She says,” I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night and that is hard!It is so pleasant to be out in the great room and creep around as I please.” (537) At this point in the book her mental state has changed so
The woman behind the wallpaper symbolizes her life right now and as a wife. Considered below her husband, she has no control over her life, and the shaking represents her trying to escape. However, her “escape” was descending into insanity as she wrote, “I’ve got out at last!... And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (147).
The main character is quiet, always following orders during the day, but at night she creeps; creeps on to the very edge of the wallpaper to converse with the women trapped inside, for "by daylight, she is subdued" (245). The protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" thoroughly describes how the absence of light changes the paper, claiming "it changes as the light changes" (244) though it is only her perception of it that is distorted. There is a quality to the wallpaper that disturbs her inner being, "things in that paper that nobody knows"
However, we later see a shift in her feelings towards the wallpaper as she states that she is growing “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” and comes to a realization that it may be “because of the wallpaper” (Par 94) As her opinions on the wallpaper begin to change, the progression of her mental instability becomes increasing visible. She begins to build a relationship with the wallpaper and claims that “There are things in that paper that nobody knows about” (Par 22) her. As this relationship with the wallpaper builds, her sanity begins to slip, and the hallucinations begin in a somewhat minor manor. In her first mention of “the woman” she says that the pattern on the
She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.
The woman in the wallpaper is trapped just like she is. The narrator creates a figure that she could relate to and then spends all her time focused on the figure and trying to figure out how to help the woman in the wallpaper escape her cell. As the story continues and she remains isolated, it is obvious Jane views herself as the woman inside the wallpaper. As a result of being trapped in her room, she begins to lose her sanity. She believes she is trapped in the wallpaper and must escape its holds.
At first it is seen as nothing but an old ruined wallpaper with a “bad” pattern. As the story progresses she stares at the paper for hours and sees a sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. She hen sees a desperate woman trying to leave the wallpaper which shows how the women feel trapped. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol of the oppressive life that many women have today and back then.
She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.
However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the
(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”
Initially, the narrator is disgusted and irritated by the paper, claiming, “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (339). This reaction mirrors that of a sane person’s--fearing the unknown, they distance themselves from insanity and any iteration of it, seeing it as grotesque and shameful. Yet, as she spends more time in the room, she grows interested in the wallpaper and begins to investigate. She comes to the conclusion that: “I didn 't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (346).
As the narrator becomes more fascinated with the wallpaper she moves progressively away from her normal day-to-day routines and lifestyle. When the narrator finally recognizes herself as the woman trapped in the wallpaper she screams at her husband "I 've got out at last," (Gilman 656) "you can 't put me back" (Gilman 656). She realizes woman are forced to hide behind the internal patterns of their lives and they need that she needs to be
To be trapped in one's own mind may be the worst prison imaginable. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator of the story is constantly at battle with many different forces, such as John, her husband, the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of her room, and ultimately herself. Throughout the story the narrator further detaches herself from her life and becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in her temporary home, slowly driving her mad. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a major and dynamic character as she is the main character of the story, and throughout the story her personality and ways of thinking change drastically.
As this progresses, the woman starts to go mad from ignorance and starts to believe there is someone behind the Wallpaper. In her room, the narrator starts to obsess over the Wallpaper. The Wallpaper symbolizes women starting to realize how unfair they were treated and how responded to this. As the women’s illness keeps getting subdued by her husband, she starts to go mad and the wallpaper demonstrates this. In the third entry of her diary she says, “Of
Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.