Feminism In 'The Yellow WallpaperAndA New England Nun'

“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 woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is slowly deteriorating in mental state. When she first moves into the room in the old house, the wallpaper intrigues her. Its pattern entrances her and makes her wonder about its makeup. But slowly her obsession with the wallpaper grows, taking over all of

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story which shows the anatomy of an oppressive marriage. Simply because the narrator does not cherish the joys of married life and motherhood, and therefore, is in

When “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins Jane seems to be quite coherent and sane but as the story progresses so does her insanity. As Jane becomes more constrained by John and others around her to do less with her day in order to rehabilitate her mental health, the woman becomes more visible to her. “But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 795). Jane begins to see something in the wallpaper around the same time that she mentions that John’s sister is taking care of her.

The yellow wallpaper is symbolized by being an imprisonment to the narrator. She asked if it could be taken down, but is told no and is stuck in the room with it. Throughout the story the narrator's opinions and feelings of the wallpaper start to change. At the beginning she describes it as unpleasant, and is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The pattern of the wallpaper is what draws the most attention to her. She tries to figure out how the pattern is organized and the meaning it represents. After staring at the paper for many hours she starts to see a ghostly figure behind the pattern, but only in certain light. The wallpaper eventually starts to resemble a desperate woman who is looking for freedom because she is trapped. The narrator realizes that her husband's treatment is not working for her and sees the wallpaper as a prison she is stuck in. The story describes it saying “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be (Gilman).” She eventually becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and realizes that she is the woman behind bars in the wallpaper who can not

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman. This story portrays the feminist point of view on how women are mistreated. The main character is the wife in the story, and she is supposedly mentally ill. Therefore, her husband makes her move to a new house. The new house has a room with barred windows and yellow wallpaper, which becomes the room the wife stays in. The yellow wallpaper in the room has a certain shape trapped behind the wall, the shape of a woman. The wife spends the majority of the story trying to get the woman out from behind the wallpaper where she is trapped. The woman that she thinks is trapped behind the wallpaper is symbolizing how

he yellow wallpaper in the short story “ The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Is a symbol for whom the unknown narrator actually is and how she truly feels. The wallpaper represents the barrier that the male dominated society has constructed against women. When the wallpaper starts to reveal bars, it shows that she truly feels trapped and hidden and she is very attached to it that she watches it at daylight and night . Also as the wallpaper becomes more twisted, she starts to see this woman behind it which shows that she has become more mentally unstable. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over (Gilman 9).”

Jane a young wife of a physician narrates Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. She embodies an oppressed woman who is subjected to isolation. The author uses the yellow wallpaper that surrounds Jane as symbolism to her inner struggle of oppression and her desire for freedom. The woman who resides in the wallpaper is Jane herself. As the story unfolds Jane realizes she is the only one who can set herself free.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells the story of Jane, a woman trapped in a room covered in yellow wallpaper. Her husband and physician, John put Jane there in hopes that she will recover from the “nervous depression” going on in her life. Throughout the story, Jane becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper and the “woman” stuck in it. As Jane loses touch with the outer world, she starts to come to a better understanding of the inner reality of the type of life she is living. The internal conflicts the narrator is facing is crucial to understanding what she is really going through; in reality, and in her mind.

The Subordination of Women in Marriage Many women in the past and even some today have experienced injustice. During the time of Charlotte Perkins Gilman most marriages were a symbolic institution signifying the subordination of a woman to her husband. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman critiqued the position that women were given in marriage. Women had to submit to their husband and were expected to stay home.

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.

In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the wallpaper seems to encapture the woman's attention in trying to save someone who is trapped in the fold of the wallpaper unbeknownst to her she is trying to free herself due to the unstable mental state that she is in and no one is providing her with. The narrator’s idea of the house and the wallpaper began to transform from ordinary wallpaper, to the progression of her breaking out from her own shell. It is as if she was being caged by the people who did not believe her illness was real.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" begins with a woman writing in her journal, although her husband forbids her to do anything that requires exercising her mind or body, including caring for her newborn baby. She explains that she has depression, but that her husband is a renowned doctor and his treatment includes being secluded in a tiny room that she believed was a nursery. Over the course of the story, the woman forms an obsession with the yellow wallpaper in the room which her husband orders her to stay in. Eventually the narrator began seeing a woman in the wallpaper, who appeared to be trapped. This sensation got worse and worse until the narrator had a mental breakdown and tore the wallpaper down. When her husband returned to see the

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story edited based on the author’s own experience. She fell into depression after giving birth to her daughter, and she was treated by her doctor with his famous treatment “rest cure”. Gilman described in her autobiography, the treatment drove her insane, and her thoughts were ignored by her doctor and her husband, which was identical to Jane’s situation. The feminine characters in the story represent the general condition of women in the late-nineteenth-century society. As a female writer, she used her personal experience to create a story which embodies the thoughts on life and society from a feminist perspective. At the beginning of the story, Jane was diagnosed with mild depression, her husband- John; the man has strong confidence in his medical skills, sent her to an ancestral house for the popular depression treatment “rest cure” regardless of her own advice. The house is a hereditary estate, located miles from the village, elegant environment with fresh air, and magnificent high rents, but also appears desolated. For John, he thinks it is the ideal place for Jane to get on her treatment, for which he did not hesitate to pay the rent for three months to observe the efficacy of the treatment. The room John chooses for Jane is a spacious and bright room, designed specifically for recuperation purposes. The room is surrounded with yellow wallpaper, which Jane hates at first

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story told in a first person point of view, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman wrote this feminist masterpiece in attempt to create change. She lived in a tie where women could not do any intellectual work, but only stay at home with the kids. Gilman believed that women needed the opportunity to work and be in control over their own life. While Gilman wrote many poems and short stories concerning the feminist movement, The Yellow Wallpaper is her most famous work. In the “Yellow Wallpaper,” after giving birth, the narrator suffers from depression. Even though she thinks there is nothing wrong with her, her husband John who is a physician, prescribes the “rest cure” treatment. Her husband has rented out a mansion for the summer so she can recover.