Effects of Isolation in the Yellow Wallpaper

Adversity is something we will all face. It’ll affect everyone ranging, from myself to characters in a book. Even though going through something so challenging, so painful, and so life changing can be hard, how you chose to handle it affects whether or not you overcome it. Adversity can either break a person or make them stronger; it’s up to their will to fight.

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the

After securing herself in the room the narrator says, “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard”! She has began to believe that the women behind the wallpaper is herself and that she must return to her rightful place come night fall, proving that she has gone completely mad. The character’s illness develops form her paranoia and curiosity about the ‘trapped women’ within the wallpaper to

With the ending near, the narrator gradually descends into madness. While examining the wallpaper closely at night she narrates, “The woman behind it shakes it!” she writes, “and she crawls around fast and her crawling shakes it all over.” “And in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (Gilman 516). The woman that the narrator sees is actually herself. It is a projection of her because she cannot escape John’s control just how the woman cannot escape the wallpaper. Her illness has become so great she thinks a woman is shaking the wallpaper around the entire room. The problem here is John’s treatment. It has caused her to believe in ghostly objects that do not exist. The phrase, “her crawling shakes it all over” shows how John’s treatment has affected her. The narrator crawls and creeps around the room. She goes

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

The "Yellow Wall Paper "by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression. The setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the driving force in the story because it is the main factor that caused the narrator to go insane.

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

The chosen interpretation rests on how the narrator’s character is analyzed through her hidden thoughts and concerns. In the following paragraphs, we’ll look at how the author, Gilman, uses indirect characterization to reveal the narrator’s character through emphasis on the narrator’s thoughts.

Throughout the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator of the story displays signs of depression. The narrator of the story was brought to an old colonial mansion that has been untenanted for a long while by her husband John, who believed that she had a nervous condition. On the walls in the nursery of the house, there was yellow wallpaper that, according to the narrator, was horrific. After staying in the house a while, the narrator began to become obsessed with the wallpaper, and she would use some bizarre language to describe the sight. When the narrator describes the wallpaper you can tell that there is a something deeper that’s wrong other than just a nervous condition: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken

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.

In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband has rented an old mansion in the country for the summer. John is relying on this getaway as time for his wife’s nervous condition to resolve itself with rest and medicines. As the story unfolds for the readers, it becomes apparent her husband, John, is dominating, and controlling. She feels somewhat doomed that she is unable to change her circumstances and she ends up as a victim, thus confirming the dominance of men over women during that period. Between the narrator’s controlling husband and the deterioration of her mind, she snaps and becomes completely delusional.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox: as she loses touch with the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner reality of her life. This inner/outer split is crucial to understanding the nature of the narrator’s suffering. At every point, she is faced with relationships, objects, and situations that seem innocent and natural but that are actually quite bizarre and even oppressive. In a sense, the plot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the narrator’s attempt to avoid acknowledging the extent to which her external situation stifles her inner impulses. From the beginning, we see that the narrator is an imaginative, highly expressive woman. She remembers terrifying herself with imaginary nighttime monsters as a child, and she enjoys the notion that the house they have taken is haunted. Yet as part of her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions rebel at this treatment, and she turns her imagination onto seemingly neutral objects—the house and the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration. Her negative feelings color her description of her surroundings, making them seem uncanny and sinister, and she

In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, both women are suffering from emotional situations. This pain is coming from the controlling male influences in there lives. The protagonist in “A rose for Emily” is a young, slender girl who is tormented by her father’s influence in her life. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane, is a wife who is suffering from post partum and loneliness. Both of these women suffer from similar emotional depression, but differ in the way they go about becoming free.

My perspective of Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is influenced by a great number of different and diverse methods of reading. However, one cannot overlook the feminist theorists’ on this story, for the story is often proclaimed to be a founding work of feminism. Further, the historical and biographical contexts the story was written in can be enlightened by mentioning Gilman’s relationship with S. Weir Mitchell. And I can’t help but read the story and think of Foucault’s concept of Panopticism as a method of social control. Lastly, of course, there’s the psychological perspective on the story, although in my readings of psychology, particularly the psychological knowledge surrounding both women and queers, I find the