Mental Madness In The Yellow Wallpaper

“Asylums. Electro-Shock Therapy. Skull drills. Pills. Exorcism. Isolation. Lobotomies. Many of the drastic procedures that have been put in place to relieve a person of mental illness are only successful in creating ‘vegetables’ out of patients, not curing their illness but making them ghosts of their previous selves.” (History Cooperative) In the Yellow Wallpaper the main character's condition deteriorates through the beginning, middle, and end of the short story.

Like most individuals, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” gradually shows increased symptoms of insanity. She begins the summer as a sane individual. As time progresses, she starts acting

Paula A. Treichler from the University of Illinois analyzes “The Yellow Wallpaper” and its effects of the diagnosis given to the main character effectively in her article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”. In her article, Treichler emphasizes the reasons why the main character was lead to believe her diagnosis from her husband and the other contributing factors that played a role in her hysteria, such as lack of social interaction and confinement.

She described the wallpaper as, “the color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” (227). The color yellow tends to represent the sun and can be interpreted as happiness, positivity, and joy; although, the narrator says that it is an unclean yellow that made her feel sick. This analogy implies that the narrator is in a position where she is ill but is not getting the help she desperately needs. The narrator goes on to say, “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long,” (227). The wallpaper represents how the narrator feels on the inside. She feels trapped, afraid, and alone from everyone-including her husband,

The author of the Yellow Wallpaper is Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860—1935), an outstanding American feminist, writer, novelist and so on. During her life, Gilman has written so many poetry and short stories. She is a utopian feminist and is honored as a role model for future generations of females due to her odd concepts and lifestyle. The Yellow Wallpaper is not the first or the longest work of her, but it is a best-seller of all her works. In this short story, Gilman devotes the work to the role of females. The book is also known as semi-autobiography of Charlotte. The story is about a woman who suffered from mental illness after giving birth to her little daughter. She knows that she is ill, as well her husband and her brother. To cure her, her husband let her stay in a room with nothing to do, just rest. Especially, for the sake of her health, she cannot read or write, which is the favorite thing of her, even she thinks that reading and writing is helpful to her health, but her husband forbids it. The yellow wallpaper of this room so attracted her that she becomes insane at last. In this book, Gilman mostly illustrate how the woman’s lack of freedom both in their mental and emotional in the patriarchal society. The husband in the book is a doctor, but he cannot treat his wife, even make her insane by his fault rest cure treatment. As for the heroine, the wife in the book, maybe become insane is also a

Initially, the narrator is disgusted and irritated by the paper, claiming, “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (339). This reaction mirrors that of a sane person’s--fearing the unknown, they distance themselves from insanity and any iteration of it, seeing it as grotesque and shameful. Yet, as she spends more time in the room, she grows interested in the wallpaper and begins to investigate. She comes to the conclusion that: “I didn 't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (346). This observation also serves as the narrator recognizing the paper’s, or boundary’s, relevance to herself; she sees a “woman”--a reflection of herself--trapped behind the paper, confined by that thin line that separates herself from total insanity. Her behavior becomes obsessive: she keeps a constant vigil of the wallpaper at night, and claims that the woman behind the wallpaper “is all the time trying to climb through” (348). And the narrator aids her escape--as soon as she is given the opportunity: “I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (349). The destruction of the wallpaper is symbolic of her fully delving into the world of insanity. From this point

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female narrator is greatly troubled by the suppression of her imagination by her husband and her ultimate isolation due to this subordination. These feelings are reflected through the author’s use of setting as the narrator’s dreary and malicious descriptions of the house and the wallpaper mirrors her emotional position.

Due to the famous rest treatment in which the narrator is told to follow, her interactions with other individuals is severely limited. Most of her social interactions are between her and her husband John. The narrator’s relationship with her husband is considered to

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.

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 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.

In the story, the narrator's better half adds to the generalization individuals put on the rationally sick as he confines his significant other from social circumstances and keeps her in an isolated house. The narrator it's made out to trust that something isn't right with her and is informed that she experiences some illness by her own significant other John. As we come to discover John, controls the narrator and she, with her benevolence and love that she has for John trusts whatever he advises her. All through the start of the story, it is obvious that the narrator wishes to talk, however, something holds her back and this consumes her since she has nobody to converse with. The narrator says, "It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so". The incongruity of this quote and of the entire story is that this is a marriage, but the relationship amongst John and the narrator are

During the period of modernism, unexpected breaks in tradition occurred with viewing the world differently. The authors used literature during the modernism time to show the decay and the growing alienation of individuals. A portrayal of a restricted role in society stands reflected in Charlotte Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The protagonist knows she is limited in her role in society as she agonizes what her husband will think of her actions. By visualizing the woman behind bars she pictures herself self-consciously. To capture the reader’s attention Charlotte Gilman uses a short story demonstration fear and insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Gilman uses imagery to illustrate how a limited role of a female in society can drive her insane.

Sometimes people are put into positions where the importance of self- expression does not exist. In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator suffers from chronic depression when she moves into a new house with her husband John, also known as her doctor. As an attempt to treat her for chronic depression, John locks the narrator into a room where she notice for the first time the horrible yellow wallpaper. In her secret journal, the narrator writes about the disturbing wallpaper and was forced to stop writing by her husband. John sister Jennie came to nurse the narrator and also play as a housekeeper. Over the course of time, being in isolation, the narrator becomes fond of the wallpaper studying and attempting to figure out the pattern. As her obsession grows over the wallpaper the pattern becomes clear to her. She begins to see a woman bending down creeping behind the patterns that act like bars on a cage. The wallpaper dominates her imagination and she begins to sleep less. she sees the woman behind the pattern shaking the bars in the day and creeping during the night. When she thinks John and Jennie is aware of her obsession she goes into a frenzy and starts to bite and rip at the wallpaper. At this point the narrator thinks she herself came out of the wallpaper and when John sees his wife in her state of insanity he faint in the