Descent Into Madness In Charlotte Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ depicts the restrains that were imposed …show more content…
She begins to see strangles heads in the wallpaper, which can be a symbolic representation of the patriarchal order that stifled women. The bars on the wallpaper that cage the imaginary women are a reflection of her own situation where she is confined in the old mansion. Even the smell of the wallpaper, which she describes as being ‘yellow’ and present throughout the house, is a reflection of the mental repression that is always present in her life. She is so consumed by the smell that she thinks about burning the old mansion just to cover it …show more content…
The repressed self is released out by detaching from reality. This detachment allows her to be free from social norms as her madness now allows her to no longer conform to cultural bounds. Her final protest, thus, comes out in the form of insanity. She can now escape from the cage of her husband by refusing to accept her identity as a repressed woman. This text thus brings to focus the dark theme that cultural and social expectations of women are so rigid that the protagonist has to give up her identity as a sane woman to finally achieve the freedom she is denied through
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1887 Words | 8 PagesAbstract Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Susan Glaspell's Trifles piece the themes of the risky nature of repression, the treatment of women, and isolation. Both women are victims of a domestic prison and a prison for their own mind, created by society and their husbands, who are sufferers themselves in a way, of a Gilded Age mentality. The women have no voice, authority, or ability to make their own decisions. Their intellect and inspiration is considered a lighthearted obstacle and a interference from their only jobs as homemakers. There is satire in the conclusions of these stories in that the victims/women turn the tables on their oppressors.
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1284 Words | 6 PagesThe narrator is then confined to her room with the Yellow Wallpaper and slowly becomes her only obsession. “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream” (Gilman 798).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
766 Words | 4 PagesThe short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman proves that women were treated poorly before the 20th century, and that in their marriages they had no say, and were considered inferior to their husbands. This paper will analyze Gilman’s short story from the perspective of a depressed woman in the late 18th century to the early 19th century. Before the 20th century women were treated poorly, we can see this in Gilman’s text, “.... he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (56)
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Essay On The Narrator's Madness In The Yellow Wallpaper
1113 Words | 5 PagesSecondly, 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
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900 Words | 4 PagesThe protagonist epitomizes middle-class womenfolk in the 19th century and her husband epitomizes menfolk in contemporary society. When she is being controlled by her husband, it symbolizes the women’s conduct being controlled by the patriarchal culture of the time. The supremacy exercised by these 19th-century men over their women become prisons from which victims like Gilman and her protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper must
Theme Of Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper
562 Words | 3 Pages(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!”
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1134 Words | 5 PagesThis paper focused on analyzing Gilman 's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” through the lens of psychoanalysis and feminism. From a psychoanalytic perspective readers got the opportunity to learn that the narrator 's temporary nervous depression became a lifelong depression; her husband John, an authoritative figure, prevented her from growing as person—individuality for person growth. Now, through the lens of feminism, readers got the chance to learn that during the nineteenth-century, women lived in a restrained world, where men serve as the decision makers. Analyzing a literary text through different lens enables readers to embark on different voyages; where each destination allows readers to view a text from
Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
227 Words | 1 PagesCharlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the tale of a nameless, sick woman who was confined to a colonial mansion's old nursery to recuperate from, as the Doctors at the end of the 19th century named it, "a slight hysterical tendency" (Teichler 1984: 61, Geilman 1997: 1-15.). As the title says, the yellow wallpaper covering the walls in this room is a vital part of the story, and as Beth Brunk-Chavez suggests in her article on Studies in Pop Culture, even if these walls "do not actually "talk", at least [they can] come alive to reveal something once hidden or papered over" (Brunk-Chavez 2003: 71, Lupton 2006: 403). This "living" wallpaper is a vital part of the main character's narration, illustrates the progress
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1612 Words | 7 PagesShe feels trapped and there is no way for her to escape. Eventually Jane starts to see the faces of women trapped behind the bars of the paper. She realizes that the image in the wallpaper is not another woman; it is herself as well as all women in general who are trapped by
Critical Analysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper
750 Words | 3 PagesA Feminist Critique of the Women’s Role in the 19th Century Society During the course of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper” story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author use the character of the narrator - to whom we never get to know her name and John – the narrator husband to illustrate how a women can become unbalance because of the medical methods to cure insanity and anxiousness in woman’s during the 19th century. More importantly, it shows how women were treated on their daily day life, how they were expected to take care of the kids, maintain the house clean and never disobey their husbands advise. On the contrary of men, who were allowed to have jobs, education, social life plus many more benefits resulted in the women’s inability to raise their voice and show opposition to the patriarchal society. As a key segment of
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1155 Words | 5 PagesEnclosed 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.
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1091 Words | 5 PagesShe identified the yellow wallpaper as a metaphor for women’s discourse. The narrator’s underlying feelings of confusion, depression, and frustration was covered by the yellow wallpaper which she rips from the walls at the very end to reveal “what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque or fails to perceive at all” (35). The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as the conflict of gender inequality and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The imagery reflects on how women feel toward sexual inequality and the situation with
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