Insanity In The Yellow Wallpaper

The yellow wallpaper has become an obsession and fascination for the narrator, while she is becoming

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that was written in first person during 1892. This story depicts society’s attitude towards women with a mental illness at that time. Ultimately, the story shows how women were treated in the 19th century. “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder— I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!” (231). Shortly after the narrator who remains unnamed and her husband John rented an old mansion, the narrator encountered a state of delusion in the wallpaper that surrounded her. In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator develops a peculiar relationship with the wallpaper; the author’s use of allusion, symbolism, and personification identifies the existence of the woman’s illness.

In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents how wretchedness is overlooked and changed into blended sentiments that eventually result in a significantly more profound enduring incongruity. The Yellow Wallpaper utilizes striking mental and psychoanalytical symbolism and an effective women's activist message to present a topic of women' have to escape from detainment by their male centric culture.

Gilman also highlights a lack of identity of the narrator through the setting of the novella which reflects the narrator’s societal confinement. The protagonist is surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, which create a sense of separation that the narrator feels from others and the outside world. In addition, the room in which she is confined contains a “heavy bedstead, and… barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on”. These physical and ‘prison-like’ restrictions imposed on the protagonist clearly demonstrate her lack of freedom. Additionally, Gilman’s use of syndetic listing to describe the narrator’s physical entrapment is perhaps reflective of her feelings of suffocation and her inability to escape as the list feels never ending. Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity.

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 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story.

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. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is tired, yet

The unnamed narrator has many mental problems. First of all, according to Freud, the unconscious affects the conscious in the form of guilt. The narrator always has an overwhelming sense of guilt. For example, the narrator says "he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more." (648). The feeling of guilt intensifies more when she feels that she is "a comparative burden" when she was "meant to be such a help to" him. (649). She does not want "to make him uncomfortable." (649). Secondly, there is also a sense of confinement throughout the story. The Yellow Wallpaper fits the winter or the anti-romantic phase of Northrop Frye's monomyth diagram as it, "tells the story of imprisonment … and fear." (Bressler 152). The narrator is imprisoned in the room which has yellow wallpaper. Basically, the room where the narrator is staying in is like a prison. The "windows are barred" (648), and the unmovable bed "that is nailed down" add to her feeling of imprisonment. (650). Thirdly, the narrator suffers from oppression.

Women with mental illnesses in the 1800s were not taken very seriously. They were often told to get some rest, and they would be fine. Taking rest involved being alone for a long period of time and doing nothing at all. This is precisely what happened to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. Little did doctors understand that isolation and sitting idly can cause mental illnesses to get worse. It is evident that the narrator is frequently alone with her thoughts. Her husband, John, “is away all day, and even some nights” (42), and Jennie, who takes care of her, leaves her to be alone and does the housework. This isolation caused her mental health to deteriorate. A dangerous effect of the complete isolation the narrator experienced is obsession. The narrator was told to do nothing, except sleep. She could not even talk to anyone about how she felt. One of

If someone you knew was mentally ill, do you think the best choice would be to keep them alone? Do you think treating them like a five year old is what they need or want? In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrators husband John treating her as if she were a child that needed to be protected from the outside would only lead her closer to insanity. John made her stay in the house as if she were one of his patients. He completely cut her off from the outside world and wouldn 't let her see her friends simply because he thought they 'd worsen her condition. She was like a child and John was her strict father, he wouldn 't let her do anything besides eat and sleep.

The main characters’ fall into madness is reasonable considering the treatment of the people around them. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the protagonist faces the fragile treatment of her peers. Her husband, his

Mental disorders are extremely prominent in today’s society and need to be carefully handled. Depression is a very serious disorder, and doctors need to take proper care of their patients, which is clearly not the case in “The Yellow Wall-paper”. The narrator in this short story is subject to extended free time and progressively slips out of reality day by day while writing in her journal. This transition from reality to fantasy in the narrator is due to doctoral neglect and marital control as the inattention and disbelief of serious mental illness by John in “The Yellow Wall-paper” is what caused the narrator to slip out of reality and fall into psychosis.

The narrator of the yellow wallpaper has visual and olfactory hallucinations, but has a large and confusing fixation; yellow wallpaper; while the caretaker in “The Tell-Tale Heart” has visual and aural hallucinations but a fixation the size of a man’s eye. His insanity extended only as far as the eye was concerned; she went completely insane and actually began to have a second personality in an inexistent

Throughout short fiction, Charlotte Gilman is most famously noted for her ability to create strong gothic themes in her writing. This is especially true in her 1890s story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Overall, an important theme in Charlotte Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that when combined, isolation and oppression often lead to negative consequences such as insanity and mental instability. Gilman achieves this through her thorough use of symbolism and settings that helps to highlight and establish the overall theme.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a young woman who is battling severe depression. The protagonist is essentially locked away for the summer as a cure for her psychological disorder(s) (Craig 36). Being locked in the house with the yellow wallpaper worsens her mental state and eventually drives her to insanity. Throughout the course of the story, the protagonist’s mental state noticeably declines; she claims there are people in the wallpaper and believes it is haunting her. Several Gothic themes are scattered throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”; however, the protagonist’s isolation, the presence of insanity, and the occurring idea of supernatural elements are most prominent and can be used to justify “The Yellow