Insanity is a deranged state of the mind. Not everyone has the same experiences nor the same symptoms which lead to their mental disorder. In her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a peculiar case of insanity. The main character is put on bed rest to overcome her temporary nervous depression. However, while being stuck inside the room, the unreliable narrator increasingly becomes more and more symptomatic. Gilman shows the progression of the main character’s insanity through the woman in the wallpaper, John, and the bed.
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. Gilman intentionally tried to make Jane a typical woman of the time period. She is economically dependent on her husband, as she does not work out of the house. She is not allowed to make her own decisions, John will not let her out of bed, even though she wishes to do so; and she is often treated like a child, John gives her a dirty look when she expresses that she is still not well when he believes that she is getting
In addition to physical descriptions, a sense of identity can be established through the delivery of relationships with others, and moral beliefs. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the interplay of characters plays a key role in defining the narrator’s identity through the imbalance of power in her marriage with John. Gilman arguably presents the narrator’s descent into madness through her inability to create a new identity counter to John’s entrapment of her. At the beginning of the novella, the protagonist is able to recognise that more
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
The woman in the wallpaper is trapped just like she is. The narrator creates a figure that she could relate to and then spends all her time focused on the figure and trying to figure out how to help the woman in the wallpaper escape her cell. As the story continues and she remains isolated, it is obvious Jane views herself as the woman inside the wallpaper. As a result of being trapped in her room, she begins to lose her sanity. She believes she is trapped in the wallpaper and must escape its holds. No one could see that the narrator is completely unstable because she is withdrawn from everyone as an effect of her depression. By the time the husband notices her state of mind, it is too late. The narrator is mentally gone and stuns the husband. As the husband faints, Jane is too withdrawn to respond; therefore, she continues her routine although her husband’s body is lying in the way. She loses her sanity because she has to find companionship in wallpaper since she could not associate with any living beings. In Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane, the narrator, is isolated from society as part of her “rest cure” treatment for her postpartum
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.
The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, reflects the life of many women during the difficult times they were living in. The narrator can relate to many people during the Victorian age where the woman’s role was to be a wife and a mother only. The narrator is a woman who is imaginative and is dissociated from herself and from the world.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.
Gilman, in this particular passage of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” explores the theme of female oppression through imagery and symbolism of the wall-paper. These elements of literature make the wall-paper come to life for both the narrator and the audience. “The front pattern does move”(55) personifies the wall-paper to be so animate and physically restraining that the woman behind it must shake it to attempt to escape. The italicization of “does” serves to further affirm that the wallpaper exhibits restrictive human-like behaviors - particularly those of dominant men in society. The narrator states that there are “a great many woman behind”(55), extending the metaphor to all Victorian women in the United States and others around the world who are oppressed. Many women were in fact belittled by the ideal of true womanhood and exhibited characteristics such as submissiveness or piety. Gilman also employs somber diction throughout the story, such as “crawl”(55) and “creep”(58) to suggest that covert agency is the only way for women to improve their situations at
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.
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.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars. 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. Therefore, John represents the bars of the wallpaper which confines the woman and doesn 't allow her to be free.
The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.” It is also significant to note that the narrator describes the pattern as suicidal because it again emphasizes the narrator’s desperate, almost suicidal, need to flee the imprisonment of the nursery and from the oppressive, male-dominant society that the room and its wallpaper represent. Asides of the pattern, there are many probable connotations of the yellow colour of the wallpaper, for instance with jaundiced illness, and also the rigid oppression of masculine sun. While sickness can be associated with the colour yellow, its more established motif would seem be the conflict between the masculine sun and the feminine moon. In Gilman’s story, sunlight is linked with John’s