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Essay Comparing Jane Eyre And The Yellow Wallpaper

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Oftentimes, stories composed in a conventionally gothic aspect also conceal tales of suffering, repression, and resistance underlying the otherwise eerie façade. This subversive technique applies, in particular, to several prominent foremothers in women’s literature, many of whom have attained recognition for their forward-thinking during an era of absolute patriarchal domination. For women writers, gothic literature possesses an inherent ability to serve as a platform to explore broader thematic concerns in a discreet fashion. Thus, the haunted setting, trivialization of feminine fear, and alter-ego madwoman motif in Charlotte Bronte’s, “Jane Eyre,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is instrumental to each author’s shrouded …show more content…

Gilman’s short story follows the gradual deterioration of its narrator’s mental state, a woman ambiguously referred to as Jane but whom remains otherwise unnamed. The tale begins with the narrator detailing her family’s relocation to a summer-house, which she describes as “[a] colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, a haunted house” with “something queer about it” (Gilman 1392). Discernibly, Gilman uses this deliberately foreboding imagery to hint at the sinister events that ensue. To expand, whilst occupying the house, the narrator is confined interminably to an upstairs room with barred-windows and disconcerting yellow wallpaper. This prison-like solitary confinement is an attempt, at the hands of her physician husband, John, to heal her psychological instability; however, as Gilman’s writing suggests, the administration of the treatment exacerbates its retrogression and aggravates her fixation with the wallpaper. Yet, despite her outward undertaking and embracement of the prescribed rest cure, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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