The Cost of Suppression: Understanding Mary's Mental State in The Yellow-Wallpaper
In a short-story ahead of it’s time, an unwell wife named Mary experiences near constant suppression and mistreatment. Her male counterpart and lifetime companion John, undermines her mental and physical abilities to such an extent that she is driven to extreme measures. This societal oppression becomes apparent when a deeper look is taken into what “equality" used to look like. A textbook example that perfectly represents how unjust day to day life was for women, is Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s, The Yellow Wall-Paper. Published in 1892 this work of feminist literature sheds light on the societal and cultural oppression experienced by women during the late 19th
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Mary's visions of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper can be interpreted as a metaphor for her own confinement within the patriarchal system. “Nobody could climb through that pattern.” (Stetson, 8). This ‘woman behind bars’ hallucination implies that women cannot escape a system engineered to work in favour of men, none of them can climb through and overcome oppression. Furthermore, her hallucinations and delusions can be seen as a coping mechanism for dealing with the trauma of her oppression. Mary internalizes her own oppression by projecting it onto the woman she perceives behind the wallpaper, leading her to take extreme measures to ensure that John does not trap her again, exclaiming that she has “got out at last.” (Stetson, 10). This can be inferred as escaping the cycle of overruling and silencing. Collectively, her obsession with the wallpaper embodies her desire to get away from the gender norms that she is forced into and escape her inequitable lifestyle. “And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Stetson, 10). She mentally achieves this desire when she destroys the metaphysical representation of her
The protagonist of the story, a woman suffering from postpartum depression, is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper that she finds increasingly oppressive and disturbing. The wallpaper symbolizes the patriarchal society that confines women to prescribed roles and suppresses their creativity and autonomy. The protagonist's obsession with the wallpaper represents her own descent into madness, as she struggles against the constraints of her society and her own mental illness. Both stories show how women are oppressed by patriarchal societies and how that oppression has a profound impact on their mental and emotional well-being. The symbols used in both stories convey the sense of confinement and the destruction of potential that comes with that oppression.
Repressions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the narrator and her husband John help express a variety of themes addressing marriage, gender roles, and gender discrimination. The short story starts with the narrator and her husband moving into a colonial mansion for the summer. They do this to improve the narrator’s health. Stetson does not tell the readers what the narrator’s illness is; however, from the story it appears as if the narrator is mentally unstable and nervous.
As was common of the treatment of women during the nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is one of oppression as John, the protagonist's physician husband, tries to cure her mental illness with a treatment plan of solitude and rest after moving in hopes his wife will regain her health. While critics have debated what causes the character's eventual insanity, María Teresa González Mínguez suggests that lack of a creative outlet lends to the woman's rapid regression. The protagonist's lack of a creative outlet combined with isolation ensures a downward spiral for the woman as symptoms of her mental illness ultimately consume her. While John hopes monitoring his wife's behaviors will cure her, his efforts only worsen her mental state.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper presents a number of forms of control that the narrator is confronted with throughout the story. The forms of control presented in this story serve to demonstrate the oppressive weight of the patriarchy experienced by women at the time The Yellow Wallpaper was written. Gilman displays patriarchal control in both physical and psychological forms. She also presents a narrator who has internalized these oppressive expectations and her descent into madness which allows her a glimpse at freedom.
Throughout the story, her own concerns for her mental health are diminished and written off as simply nervousness that will eventually go away. The lack of proper care for her and her involuntary confinement to the room with the yellow wallpaper eventually causes the woman to end up in full psychosis, characterized by hallucinations of a woman trapped within the paper. The woman seen within the paper not only represents the actual woman’s need for a voice to give her freedom but also her inability to escape the constraints of the patriarchal standards being imposed upon her. It is not until she completely loses herself to the delusions and finds herself tearing down the wallpaper that she feels she has escaped her own husband’s constraints. Gilman uses symbolism in the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to convey that within a world with insane standards and rules, a woman’s only reasonable option is to go insane
The yellow wallpaper in the room the narrator despises, is a reflection of women’s status in society, being trapped under the power of males. The narrator lost all of her freedom to John. John has gotten to such a point of control where she cannot even pick who she can spend time with and where she can sleep. After John told her she could not, the narrator started writing down her thoughts and her mental illness was getting so bad to the point where there has been “things in that paper that nobody knows but [her].” The narrator is now completely insane because of her husband.
Prescribing Madness: Analyzing The Damaging Relationships In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a haunting portrayal of the dangers of the 'rest cure' treatment for women with mental illness in the late 19th century. To showcase these dangers the story follows an unnamed narrator whose journal entries document her descent into madness as she is prescribed the rest cure and confined to the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a colonial mansion by her husband and physician John. By examining the doctor-patient and husband-wife relationships of the two, as well as John’s actions and the narrator's emotional state, it is made clear that Gilman is critiquing the patriarchal societal norms
The Unnamed Woman Up until the 1900’s woman had few rights, thus they relied heavily on men. Women could not vote, they could not own their own property, and very few worked. Women’s jobs were solely to care for children and take care of the home. Women during this time, typically accepted their roles in society and the economy ( “Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1909”).
Secondly, throughout the story, the narrator describes seeing an evolving woman trapped inside of the wall. Although readers can assume that this woman is merely a product of the narrator’s mind, the woman can also be seen as a symbol of the narrator and her feelings of being trapped. Eventually, the woman in the wall aids the narrator in her escape. In conclusion, many elements of the narrator’s increasing madness throughout The Yellow Wallpaper contributed to her freedom from the confines of the room, the confines of society, and the confines of her
Passage Analysis #1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” 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.
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 protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period.
Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.
In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents how wretchedness is overlooked and changed into blended sentiments that eventually result in a significantly more profound enduring incongruity. The Yellow Wallpaper utilizes striking mental and psychoanalytical symbolism and an effective women's activist message to present a topic of women' have to escape from detainment by their male centric culture. 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.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high
Gender Inequality: A Woman’s Struggle in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman captures the lives of women in a society based on societal expectations during the late nineteenth century. She focuses on the issue of gender inequality where women were often discriminated against and expected to fulfill the role of a perfect wife and mother. The narrator is based on on Gilman’s personal experience of suffering from her treatment for postpartum depression due to the social restrictions on women which represents a reflection on women's social status in society. The narrator, who remains anonymous, is depicted as a depressed and isolated prisoner who is oppressed under her husband’s control and struggles to break free.