Essay On Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Insanity In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman deals with the narrator’s insanity as she identifies herself completely with the woman in the wallpaper. This made her believe that both she and the women have liberated themselves from masculine oppression by tearing out the domesticated prisoner in the wallpaper. Also, with the narrator being diagnosed with postpartum depression after her pregnancy, she finds herself isolated from society under the treatment of her husband who is a doctor and prescribes her not to do any form of duty/work. However, she is not the main reason to blame for her insanity because she had no chance of expressing herself but rather doing what her doctor “husband” says which lead to her inner destruction. …show more content…

As she is getting closer and closer revealing the meaning of the wallpaper, she finds out a disturbing truth of her life which is similar to the figure in the wallpaper. She is simultaneously jealous of the secret “ there are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows but me”(pg 553), and frightened of what it seems to imply. Also the narrator tries to deny her growing insight “the dim shapes get clearer every day”(pg 553), but she is powerless to extricate herself. Small wonder that the woman she sees is always “stooping down and creeping about”(pg 553). Like the narrator herself, she is trapped within a suffocating domestic “pattern” from which no escape is possible. As the result of this, she no longer has any identity. She find herself lost between the identity of Jane and the women in the wallpaper. The narrator stated, “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane”(pg 559). As a reflection of what her situation was, she said “I don't like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast”(pg 559). The narrator is scared to look back at the wallpaper because she does not have an answer for other women about what she went

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