The title of the short story is “The Yellow Wallpaper” and in fact, the vile wallpaper that the narrator hates is a huge ideogram in the story. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. As the narrator she goes on to tell a story of how she lived with her caring husband who is also her physician after giving birth. Even though she may be a woman with a high social placement, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” goes insane for many different reasons such as tonics, depression and isolation. To start with she is constantly having to take tonic’s each hour in the day.
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.
She also states at least that makes her tired. She wants a room downstairs, but John says that there is not enough room for two beds and would not be enough room if he takes another. He wants her to take a room upstairs, it was a nursery, then a playroom it has windows with bars on each wall that look out in every direction. She describes the walls as having repellant ghastly unclean yellow faded wallpaper that has been torn and shredded in patches. She stays in that dreary room alone most of the time, as John is away most the day and even the night at times., she also talks briefly about a baby that she can’t be with an it makes her nervous It’s thought that this leads to her being lonely and depressed.
Gilman is using the sub-pattern and main pattern to represent the protagonist and her longing to get out of the "cage" she has been living in. In actuality, this mansion is probably a mental health institution for women suffering from postpartum depression. At the end of the short story the protagonist realizes how mistreated she was, and takes matters into her own hand. When she rips off the wallpaper, she is finally free and shows that she is done with her mistreatment. Similar to the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter.
Gail Godwin’s protagonist in “A Sorrowful Woman“ is a classic example of a short fiction protagonist based on Edgar Allen Poe’s quantifications. One of these quantifications includes being set apart from the social norms of their society because of some physical, emotional, or mental attribute/disability. Another quantification is often that the protagonist is very much an anti-hero. In the story “A Sorrowful Woman,“ the unnamed wife embodies the traits of an outsider because she does not like taking care of her household. Also, she is an anti-hero because she locks herself up in the white room.
Critical Statement: In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman employs exclamatory functions within her syntax to display the symbolism of the woman within the wallpaper to illustrate her own constricted freedom due the influence of the masculine dominance. In the beginning of the story, Gilman illustrates the wallpaper as a catalyst for exhibiting the intensity of the narrator’s psychological disorder. After the narrator and her husband settle into their new house, the narrator inspects her room, and begins discerning ominous relations and elements within the wallpaper. “This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside
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. Throughout the reading, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s in-depth loss of touch with reality as she sinks further and further into her own reality. As she becomes more isolated, her descriptions of the house become more abstract as she begins to focus on the wallpaper and starts to see herself as being hidden behind it. In the beginning of the story, she describes
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Jane suffers from postpartum depression. Her husband John, who is a doctor, decides to exile her to a room with pale yellow walls. Overtime, Jane begins to obsess over the wall and its features. She mentions, “The patterns, the yellow, the slight coat of dust, and the roughness of the yellow wallpaper.” Jane becomes completely infatuated. She begins to spend all of her time touching, watching, and talking about the wall.
They were degraded and debased by hands to believe that they were worth almost nothing, only worthy of bearing children. This superfluous male domination tip to many women feeling snare in their own homes, unable to dodging from the childbed placed on them by their hubby. An illumination of these confines was accounted by Charlotte Perkins Gilman , a feminist writer of the nineteenth century, in her short account “The Yellow Wallpaper ”. In this story, Gilman portrays herself as a woman who is woe from post-partum depression. The woman is locked away from gild in a confined room, only to drive herself even more insane.
Living through a brief, unsuccessful marriage, postpartum depression, and relinquishment of her young child, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her experiences to create a revealing portrait of women’s societal constraints in her famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” brilliantly represents the plight of women during the Victorian era. The story tells of a woman’s dual confinement, both in a rest home, specifically, and in the society as a whole, more generally. The apparent symbolism categorizes the story as a significant and progressive feminist text. Through exploration of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s biographical influence and the symbolism throughout the short story, readers will be able to see how