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Theme Of Self-Isolation In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” narrates an ill and depressed wife slowly plummeting into insanity as she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper she hates. Gilman reveals the theme of self-isolation and its dire effects by displaying the narrator’s progressive unstable mental state throughout the story by developing the narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper, her inferiority to her husband, and how the wallpaper parallels the narrator. Gilman develops the narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper later in the story, contradicting the narrator’s distasteful attitude towards it early in the story. “I never saw a worse paper in my life.” This detail is crucial when considering that she becomes hyper-fixated on it. Her

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