Isolation is a dangerous thing. It can push us into thinking very pessimistically, which can lead us into doing harmful actions. As Miguel de Unamuno once said, “isolation is the worst possible counselor.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is portrayed as psychotic as a result of solidarity; this shows us the dangerous effects of complete isolation. 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 …show more content…
In The Yellow Wallpaper a dangerous effect of complete isolation is paranoia. It is linked in with the obsession of the wallpaper as the narrator does not want anyone else becoming interested in it. The narrator wants the wallpaper all to herself to study and becomes suspicious of John and Jennie. She claims to have “caught [John] several times looking at the wallpaper” and “caught Jennie with her hand on it” (162). This effect of isolation is dangerous because the narrator locks herself in her room and throws the key out of the window in order to free the women who are trapped in the wallpaper. This, too, intensifies the narrator’s mental
The first instance of the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” where one can see her internalizing her feelings is in the line “You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?”. This shows that she is downplaying her mental health, that because someone she loves is telling her she ’s okay, she’s not validating the feelings she is experiencing.
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.
The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is put into a room alone, isolated from the outside world with nasty wallpaper, a little table, and a bed. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was admitted to the room because of postpartum depression. The woman says that life is “much more exciting now than it used to be.” When she made this statement it was after she quite literally lost herself and went crazy running around the room and examining the walls deeply. Knowledge of mental health and illness at that time was little to none leading to this very poor way of
It is a story that could actually happen. In the story, Jane expresses concerns about her mental health to her husband, John, a doctor, who through good intentions and believing that he is doing the right thing, requires that his wife stays in bed all the time, and not do any of the things she would normally or would like to do. Due to being bed ridden, Jane becomes worse until she reached the limit and goes crazy. John’s behavior and decisions at this time were considered to be completely normal. The Yellow Wallpaper is considered to fall in the genre of realism because it represents the way life was for women during the nineteenth century.
In her society, it is the woman that is left to be alone in her own thoughts, shown through her husband’s freedom to leave the house and not come back until he wants to versus her confinement to the house. This is reflected through the various “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, making her stay isolated in the house. Ultimately, the character is overtaken by the imagination and through the
It is evident that change is a natural component in the average person’s life. Some however, are more drastic than others. This is exhibited through the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”, who undergoes a drastic change in her health due to postpartum depression, her relationships with the individuals around her, and her isolation. These changes later develop an internal conflict in the form of a troubling identity plight.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is treated for depression by “rest cure,” isolation from society, which affects her mentality causing her to become secretive, withdrawn, and insane. With the treatment
Just as Joe isolated Janie from the other people in Eatonville, John isolates his wife from the outside world, believing it will help her get better. Her isolation causes her depression to develop into hallucinations and insomnia. She envisions a woman on her bedroom wallpaper that is trapped behind a set of bars, trying to get out. The trapped woman represents the speaker, whose husband locks her away from the rest of the world. Her husband also resorts to belittling her and treats her like a child in order to get her to obey him.
She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the
In the short story “the Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator, Jane who has just given birth becomes progressively more ill and depressed. Her husband John, who is a physician prescribes that she get lots of rest and fresh air so Jane and John rent a colonial mansion for the summer. Throughout the story John is one of the main causes for Jane’s deepening depression.
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. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.
Eventually, we realize that the woman in the wallpaper is the narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator 's mental state continues to deteriorate. Being both the narrator 's husband and physician, John assumes that he knows what’s best for his wife. However, in this essay, I will argue that Gilman portrays John as an antagonist or “villain” in her story because, through his actions, he is the main reason for his wife 's descent into insanity which proves that he didn’t know what was best for his wife after all.
The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.
Glaspell uses the moods of the characters to show the readers Mrs. Wright’s descent into isolation. Mr. and Mrs. Wright lived a strange and lonely marriage, no communication between the two. Having no one to talk to, leads a person to isolate themselves. Mrs. Hale mood points out “Not having children makes less work – but it makes a quiet house and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did come in” (122). This quote shows the readers that Mrs. Wright felt very lonely when her husband was away at work.