Short stories and poetry themes are as diverse as human experiences. The beauty of nature, love for others, romance, and the divine are frequently seen on writing pages. Two short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, have very similar themes. Both of the main characters in the two stories suffer from apparent psychological disorders. Likewise, although from a different genre, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, is a poem that openly discusses the “masks” being worn in polite society. These masks could be construed to be hiding potential psychological issues and generalized feelings. All three readings have the same theme of psychological distress, but each character dealt with the issue differently. …show more content…
At first the woman believes her husband has taken her to a quiet country home to recover. Left alone in her room, she takes particular notice of the dingy yellow wallpaper. As time goes on it becomes obvious to the reader that the wallpaper is a metaphor for her restrictions and becomes symbolic of her isolation and mental deterioration. She begins to see herself trapped in the wallpaper as "a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." Then, as time goes on, she begins to strip the wallpaper off of the wall. This is truly an act of rebellion. She is finally upsetting the status quo and doing what she feels she needs to do. She is removing the “mask” to uncover the
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” (381) Her constant mention of hating the wallpaper seems like it becomes an odd obsession for the narrator. The woman who she is seeing
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the symbols and figurative language leave a lasting image on what the story has to offer. Symbolism and figurative language convey abstract meaning, by creating imaginative connections between our ideas and our senses. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the symbolism is not the yellow wallpaper itself, but nearly the sub pattern behind it.
Throughout the story, she is fixated on the “” patterns and where they start and how they fit together. After some time in the room, the narrator notes that the patterns morphe to become a woman behind bars which represent how the narrator is really feeling, trapped. As a result her own existence becomes, “mirrored in the wallpaper…(Korb n.pag.).”
In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator throughout the story always hid what she was truly feeling from John, her husband, and sister-in-law Jennie. Since
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 Wallpaper becomes a "living", narrating character which tells this story from the perspective of an it-narrative, mainly because of its intensive relationship with the main narrator. Physically, it cocoons the main character, and gradually, over the course of the character's descent into madness, also nears its own destruction until what has been trapped behind the wall, and within the main character, frees itself. Psychologically, the wallpaper in the story, has the role of conversation partner for the nameless character and becomes another narrator, one mirroring and narrating the character's inner life, which can then aids in the narration of what the woman can not say but what needs to be transmitted to the reader in order to make the character understandable (Tischleder 2014: 36).
She sees the pattern as a cage, and then recognizes women trapped in the subpattern trying to escape from the wall itself. Clearly the wallpaper is meant to represent the structure of family, medicine and tradition in which the narrator finds herself
Later in the story the readers figure out that the narrator thinks that there are many women in the wallpaper but there is one in particular that has the narrator going crazy. She sees illusions of a woman in the wallpaper with many heads, eyes all over the walls, and a pattern moving under the moonlight. The woman in particular is trapped in the pattern of the wallpaper. As the narrator is trying to get this woman out she starts to believe that she too is stuck inside the wallpaper. The narrator then begins to rip the wallpaper off the wall and into pieces.
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!”
Symbolism Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper One might know that Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses the wallpaper in the main character’s room as a symbol for a bigger underlying meaning. This is a short story about a young women diagnosed of depression and “a slight hysterical tendency”. In hopes of healing the narrator, her husband moves them into an old, ornate home for the summer and required her to refrain from any activity to calm her mind. However, instead of getting better, the narrator goes into a deeper level of madness. This madness is caused by her obsession over what she believes is animate patterns and a trapped women in a peeling, aged wallpaper in her room.
She states, “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me, not alive(Gilman 655).” In this statement, she is saying that only dead people can truly understand the wallpaper and all its beauty. By saying this, she is telling us that she has died and become the woman in the wallpaper. Once she tells herself that she has come out of the wallpaper, she starts to see that other women have come out of
The leading lady of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is separated from the world when she spends the summer in the mansion, locked in her room. “[The house] is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.” (para. 19.) The woman slowly changes throughout the story. She begins as a depressed but is still sane and able to discern why she becomes upset.
The plot of "The Yellow Wallpaper. " show that the longer this woman is trapped in this room the worse her condition becomes. Her depression slowly evolves into a personality disorder. If she would 've been able to leave the house and walk around, write and see her baby she could 've
Kevin Mathew The Yellow Wallpaper-Feminism/Oppression of Women 12/14/15 Feminism is defined as women have the same human, and social rights as men. In other words, that women should have the same opportunities and chances as men in their choices with their career, and most importantly back in the day politics. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman was written during the 19th century, which was known as the time women were nothing compared to men. Women were known as the wife/ and mother of the home, nothing more, nothing less.