Analysis of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Her loving husband, John, never takes her illness seriously. The reader has a front row seat of the narrator’s insanity voluminously growing. He has shown great patience with the recovery of his wife’s condition. However, the narrator is clear to the reader that she cannot be her true self with him. In the narrator’s eyes she feels he is completely oblivious to how she feels and could never understand her. If she did tell him that the yellow wallpaper vexed her as it does he would insist that she leave. She could not have this.

Secondly, not only does interior monologue give impact to Jane’s thoughts toward her situation and illness, but this point of view style gives unique insight into the relationships among Jane and the other characters, especially the those between Jane and her husband, John, and her sister-in-law, Jennie. At the beginning of Gilman’s story, the husband and wife relationship of Jane and John follows the pattern of the time with John taking the part of the dominant yet well-meaning husband, and Jane taking the part of the obedient wife. Except for her forbidden writing, Jane follows John’s treatment guidelines (326); however, throughout the story, the respect and obedience Jane exhibits toward John at the first start to deteriorate, and suspicion and resentment replace it. One example of this change is when Jane states, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad that my case is not serious!” (327). Not only does her paranoia grow toward John, but also toward her sister-in-law, Jennie. The

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a first-person narration of madness experienced by an unnamed woman in the Victorian era. The madness is exposed through a “nervous condition” diagnosed by the writer’s husband, a physician, who believes the only cure is prohibiting all intellectual thought and to remain in solitude for a “rest-cure”. The act of confinement propels the narrator into an internal spiral of defiance against patriarchal discourse. Through characterization and symbolism, “The Yellow Wallpaper” exhibits an inventive parallel between the narrator’s mental deterioration and her internal struggle to break free from female oppression imposed on her through her husband and society.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator must deal with several different conflicts. She is diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 221). Most of her conflicts, such as, differentiating from creativity and reality, her sense of entrapment by her husband, and not fitting in with the stereotypical role of women in her time, are centered around her mental illness and she has to deal with them.

In ?The Yellow Wallpaper? it seems that the narrator wishes to drive her husband away, spending the entire time hoping for freedom. She explains, ?John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious? (Gilman). She is glad to see her husband away so that she may be left alone to do as she pleases without interference from her husband. She is frequently rebelling against her husband?s orders. She writes in her journal and tries to move her bed when there is no one around to see. However, she always keeps an eye out for someone coming.

Like all characters throughout literature, Gilman’s narrator undergoes a journey of sorts, or a quest. However, her journey is all in her head, for she is battling a mental illness. Her husband, a

In her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expresses exasperation towards the separate male and female roles expected of her society, and the evident repressed rights of a woman versus the active duties of a man. The story depicts the methods taken to cure a woman of her psychological state during Gilman’s time, and delineates the dominant cure of the time period, “the resting cure,” which encouraged the restraint of the imagination ("The Yellow Wallpaper: Looking Beyond the Boundaries") Gilman uses the unnamed narrator to represent the average repressed woman of her time and how her needs were neglected in an attempt to mark a fixed distinction between the standards and expectations of men and women. John, the narrator’s husband, take the designated and patriarchal role of a man who believes he knows everything there is to know about the human mind. His belief of his superior knowledge pushes him to condescend, overshadow, and misunderstand his wife. As a result, his wife loses control of her life and escapes into her own fantasy world, where she is able dominate her imagination, free her mind, and fall into insanity. Gilman describes her era’s approach toward female psychology in order to criticize the patriarchal society she lived in as well as to reveal its effects on the women of her time.

Her marriage also causes her to lose control. Even within the one thing that is supposed to hold strong, she is alone. Her husband, leaving her on a daily basis to work, insists that she cannot write nor visit friends and family. Thus, he leaves her alone during the day to sit

By taking situations many have personally experienced or know someone who has, realistic fiction authors are able to reach their readers on a deeper level. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has expressed she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” because of her own personal battles with mental illness in an attempt to prevent others from “going mad”. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman introduces us to a mentally ill narrator. The narrator is the wife of an established physician and forced to “rest” in a room covered in tattered yellow wallpaper and bars so that she can cure herself of her disease. Throughout the story we follow the narrator through her days in this room and see her eventually be driven to

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the theme of madness permeates through the character Jane. Gilman portrays the theme of madness by showing, not telling. We see the world through Jane’s eyes and mind. The readers stay with Jane as the loses her grip on reality which in turn causes her actions to grow more and more chaotic as she begins seeing shapes in the wallpaper. We extrapolate that there is no actual woman in the wallpaper, but the narrator thinks so because she is losing her wits. Gilman shows Jane’s descent into madness by revealing how John looks upon her as psychotic, how John treats her like a child, and how the moment she precisely loses her sanity is the peak of the madness.

In conclusion, Gilman’s depiction of the narrator’s turbulent descent into insanity illuminates how a patriarchal society places extreme restrictions on women. That the only hope of salvation that they can reach is within madness. She does this by leading her readers to focus on feminist issues throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper.” This includes the narrator’s

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a detailed account of the author’s battle with depression and mental illness. Gilman’s state of mental illness and delusion is portrayed in this narrative essay. Through her account of this debilitating illness, the reader is able to relate her behavior and thoughts to that of an insane patient in an asylum. She exhibits the same type of thought processes and behaviors that are characteristic of this kind of person. In addition, she is constantly treated by those surrounding her as if she were actually in some form of mental hospital.

Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is centered on the deteriorating psychological condition of the female narrator. As a woman in a male dominating society in the 19th century, the narrator has no control over her life. This persistence eventually evolves into her madness. The insanity is triggered by her change in attitude towards her husband, the emergent obsession with the wallpaper and the projection of herself as the women behind the wallpaper. The “rest cure” which was prescribed by her physician husband, created the ideal environment for her madness to extend because, it was in her imagination that she had some freedom and control.

It is obvious in this story that the woman allows herself to be set lower to men, specially her husband, John. Being a Physician, he puts special orders for her to follow: To stay in bed, relax her imagination, and most important to stop her writing. Though she always felt better when she wrote, and felt it helped her, she does not argue or complain, But speaks “What can one do?” (655). This shows the lack of herself confidence and the feeling of inferiority she had. She speaks ask if anything she said did not count anyway, but she was very accepting of the situation. She expresses herself unimportant several more times through the story. “I meant to be such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already” (656).