Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is locked away in an isolated room, which was supposed to cure her mental disorder but instead it makes her worse. With the windows barred and the doors locked she is secluded from society. She wishes to go visit her cousin Henry and
In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins describes the story of a woman suffering from a mental illness during the 19th century. The protagonist (an unknown narrator) is a wife and mother suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, diagnosed her with hysteria and he decided to move away with her to start a “rest cure,” at a mansion, isolated from the village. The narrator was powerless against her husband, and he had the authority of determining what she does, who she sees, and where she goes while she recovers from her illness. Throughout the story, the author used stylistic elements, such as strong symbolism, to show how the mental state of the narrator slowly deteriorates and ends
Perception of Events in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Fall of the House of Usher
While exploring the Yellow Wallpaper, the progression of the narrator's insanity can be tracked through multiple symbols. She begins visualizing a woman, trapped inside of the wallpaper. Which may demonstrate her state of mind. Her husband John brings out the restrictive nature due to isolation. John in the leader of the house and does all of the work both in and out of the house. Her physical bed shows the chained down nature and lack of ability. While all the factors are taken into consideration, one must think about how it may be physical factors or or in her genes. In today’s society, many people only take the physical factors into consideration but disregard how it may lie within an
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator starts to realize things about the woman behind the wallpaper that she sees in herself. She can relate to the woman trying to get out and break free. She can hear the woman behind the wallpaper talking to her and it relates to her own personal thoughts, and this is why she feels obligated to help the woman escape from behind the paper. She claims to be drawn to this wallpaper, and the longer she stays in that room, the more she feels like she can clearly understand what the woman behind the paper is saying to her. The narrator also is using her illness as a crutch to not having to take care of her baby son. She has neglected her motherly duties and left the responsibility of raising him on her sister. She fails to realize that she will have to get better soon because her sister cannot continue to raise her son as her own, he needs his mother. Needless to say, she was not able to understand what had to be done in order for her to gain normalcy. None of the rehabilitation methods or prescriptions that her husband gave her worked. She ends up just as ill at the end of the story as when she first moved into the house. The narrator’s physical and mental imprisonment symbolizes the everyday struggles of women just looking for freedom within their opinion, their own minds, and representation of their being in a society that is orchestrated by the male figure.
Her original idea was that she could get a scary house to stay in for the summer. Little did she know her husband John had a different agenda. Her stress disorder skews her views but all at the same time she is still very sharp. Obviously, she was smart enough to write and know when she could do it and not be seen. When she moves into the house, John orders her to be on bed rest. Because she is a bit delusional she thinks that the room she is kept in is just an old nursery or gymnasium. The room is very large with a lot of windows. But, the thing that bothers her the most is the yellow wallpaper that she describes as an “artistic sin” (Gilman 381). Her husband is too worried about his own reputation to really help her. Throughout the story the reader can see that the narrator wants to be a strong independent woman. But, in the time that the story took place that was not okay with
Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, is a good example of Gothic Literature because it has a dark and gloomy setting and, and strange supernatural events. For example, in Poe’s story, “I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down-but with a shudder even more thrilling than before-upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eyelike windows.” Page 14. This shows gothic literature because it shows a dark setting in front, and around the house. Therefore, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is Gothic Literature because it’s a dark and strange story.
I just glanced through my phone, swiping quickly to going through the photos of everyone’s snapchat story. But one word caught my eye: fire; it caught my eye but I did not really think about it afterwards. Several hours later however, I was with my friends working on our english essay when all of a sudden, I look up to see what looked like an enormous blanket of brown dust staining the clear blue sky. There was a distinct line between the perfectly blue sky and the disgusting smoke from the fire and this transformation that occurred so out of the blue causing both shock and awe from me and my friends. Transformations play a role in stories meant to scare us by creating an atmosphere of discomfort and uncertainty because the characters are unable to control the situation around them. Through the short stories of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “House Taken Over”, and “Where is Here”, the authors of those stories all elicit an atmosphere of fear through the joint transformations of setting, mood, and characters. “The Fall of the House of Usher” change occurs at the climax of the story where Roderick Usher falls into insanity. “House Taken Over’ changes when the mysterious intruders fully overtake the house forcing the siblings to leave. In “Where is Here” the stranger leaves the home which causes the house to fade in color, draining it of life.
The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a nameless narrator who suffers from a temporary nervous condition after giving birth to her daughter and her unstable marriage to John. John her insensitive husband and physician has prescribed a “rest cure” treatment for his wife. John rents a summer mansion and confines his wife to a large nursery, which has an immovable bed, bars on the windows, and walls decorated with hideous yellow wallpaper with an eerie chaotic pattern that appears torn in areas. The narrator feels that activity and
In the opening of The Yellow Wall-Paper, the protagonist begins to explain how she and her husband rarely rent homes for the summer but are doing so because she needs rest and relaxation. This was commonly prescribed by doctors of the time to women with “nervous” disorders during the time that the story was set. This is the major theme of The Yellow Wall-Paper, the woman who is telling the story has been diagnosed with “hysteria”, which often had symptoms of anxiety and depression associated with it, and is chronicling her time spent in the upstairs room that is covered in sun-stained yellow wallpaper.
In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator begins the story as someone who really did not want to be where she was, out in the country, isolated, and alone most of the time. Her husband John, takes her to a temporary home where he believes she will be able to find the most peace and rest so that she can recover. He believes that this routine is necessary for her recovery. She, on the other hand, doubts the necessity of such a move and wonders if the mysterious house is haunted by the end of the story. Her husband Jon shows superior attitude toward her by
She knows that she is expressing a sickness that is not normal. John’s wife has post-partum depression. This has led her to insanity before she was locked into the house and forced to never read, write, or see her precious child. John instead diagnoses his wife with Temporary Nervous Depression. She reports “exhaustion, crying, nervousness, synesthesia, anger, paranoia, and hallucination.” When this story was written, it was common for women with depression to be locked up and forbidden to do things, such as read, write, or even work. Without reading or writing, she becomes fixated on the only thing available to her – the yellow wallpaper; “she locks herself in the room and succeeds in stripping off most of the remaining paper.” Slowly, while being locked up in the room, the yellow wallpaper starts to come alive. She begins seeing patterns behind the paper, but not only patterns; she starts to see herself. In this case, leaving the unnamed women all by herself at home without socializing with the real world, is driving her insane, along with crazy hallucinations and delusional
The setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” plays a critical role in understanding the story, specifically in the progression of the main character’s psychological illness. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes her room as such:
In the compelling fiction short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, the narrator is a woman that suffers from a low-grade mental illness but because she is locked away in a room her illness intensifies. The narrator’s husband, John, who is a
In The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe writes of a sickly brother and sister that live in an old estate, and a narrator’s account of the Ushers’ final days. The story is scary on two different levels. The first and most obvious that is noticed just by reading on the surface is the creepy atmosphere of the house and death of the main characters. Poe makes this level of scariness very accessible by the diction and imagery that he uses. The second level of scariness is the psychological aspect of the story. The themes of isolation, madness, and fear become terrifying because they are able to transcend the story; they are real, and they could quite possibly affect us.