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Imprisonment In The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

765 Words4 Pages

Constance Burke
Mackenzie Calhoun
English 1102
13 September 2016
The Imprisonment of The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman, which is also the narrator, who suffers from depression. Her husband, John, which is also her physician, misdiagnoses her with hysteria and prescribes her to “the rest cure.” Rather the narrator knows that she is being misdiagnosed or not, she doesn’t speaks up for herself. This is made clear when the narrator says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression- - slight hysterical tendency- - what is one to do?” (Gilman 227). Her husband believes that his wife is being overly dramatic and that there is nothing wrong with her. He feels like the nursery that is inside the colonial mansion is the safest place for her to stay in. The nursery …show more content…

The narrator expresses her feeling of imprisonment when she is reminiscing the night before. She explains how she had seen strange things on the wallpaper when the moonlight creeps in the window and reflects upon the wallpaper. She expresses the creepy feeling when she tells us that “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 234). The narrator also explains at the end of the short story that the yellow paper symbolized a jail cell for her. When she tears off most of the wallpaper in the nursery, she exclaimed, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman 237). The wallpaper represented imprisonment for the narrator because she repeatedly asks her husband to remove the wallpaper. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t allowed to do so, and she is ultimately confined to the room. By this time in the short story, the narrator is reaching her breaking

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