The main character in Susanna Kaysen’s, “Girl, Interrupted” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” are similar in the fact that they both were suppressed by male dominants. Be it therapist or physicians who either aided in their mental deformities or created them. They are similar in the sense that they are both restricted to confinement and must endure life under the watchful eye of overseers. However similar their situations may be, their responses are different.
In the stories, there were both positive and negative aspects and characteristics that the two protagonists possessed. Both women were thought insane and although they may not have been originally, being locked up made other
…show more content…
She does rebel at times but for the majority of the book, she remains compliant. Gilman on the other hand doesn’t always respond positively to her physicians. Gilman is passive in this sense but aggressive as well because she acts on her own beliefs. Throughout, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman is forbidden to invoke her passion; writing. Her brother and husband, John are both highly respected doctors that believe “Congenial work, with excitement and change,” would only worsen her case. But in spite of them, she writes anyway making sure not to be seen. Gilman’s character is a little more manic than Kaysen because she is locked up in her own house alone for the majority of her time. She is unable to leave without permission or write ever. In this aspect, I feel that being passive aggressive is a positive characteristic because it allows Gilman to fool her husband into believing she is improving. When in actuality, she’s not and she may be going crazy being cooped up in the house all the time. However it is a negative because unlike Kaysen, she acts on her impulses without thinking them through. She doesn’t take into consideration what the consequences of her actions may be. For instance, when she starts to notice the figures behind the wallpaper taking form, she starts to peel off the wallpaper. Although she says she is trying to rescue the girl stuck behind the dreaded colored paper, this act does not show her husband she is not crazy.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison. Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world. The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality. This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression, undergoing the sexist psychological treatments of mental health, that took place during the late nineteenth century. The narrator in Gilman’s story writes about being forced to do nothing, and how that she feels that is the worst possible treatment for her. In this particular scene, the narrator writes that she thinks normal work would do her some good, and that writing allows her to vent, and get across her ideas that no one seems to listen to. Gilman’s use of the rhetorical appeal pathos, first-person point of view, and forceful tone convey her message that confinement is not a good cure for mental health, and that writing,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and shows how it changes one’s life forever.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wall-Paper," does more than just tell the story of a woman who suffers at the hands of 19th century quack medicine. Gilman created a protagonist with real emotions and a real psych that can be examined and analyzed in the context of modern psychology. In fact, to understand the psychology of the unnamed protagonist is to be well on the way to understanding the story itself. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in first-person narrative, charts the psychological state of the protagonist as she slowly deteriorates into schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality).
Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.
In Thomas C. Foster’s “How to Read Literature like a Professor”, myth and archetype are thoroughly discussed and analyzed. Some of these themes are exemplified in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work, The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a nameless narrator experiences her own personal hell, driven into madness by her improper psychiatric treatment. Gilman’s text is not only a story of a woman who is essentially driven into the underground, but also a criticism of society’s view of women and mental illness. She describes the narrator’s descent as a journey, through the use of symbolism and her treatment as a mentally ill woman.
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a great example of early works pertaining to feminism and the disease of insanity. Charlotte Gilman’s own struggles as a woman, mother, and wife shine through in this short story capturing the haunting realism of a mental breakdown.The main character, much like Gilman herself, slips into bouts of depression after the birth of her child and is prescribed a ‘rest cure’ to relieve the young woman of her suffering. Any use of the mind or source of stimulus is strictly prohibited, including the narrator’s favorite hobby of writing. The woman’s husband, a physician, installs into his wife that the rest treatment is correct and will only due harm if not followed through. This type of treatment ultimately drives the woman insane, causing her to envision a woman crawling behind the yellow wallpaper of her room. Powerlessness and repression the main character is subject to creates an even more poignant message through the narrator’s mental breakdown. The ever present theme of subordination of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is advanced throughout the story by the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and allegory.
It was commonly casted that women during the 19th century were not to go beyond their domestic spheres. If a woman were to go beyond the norms and partake in a “male” activity and not assign to “womanly” duties, it were to take an ill effect on her, because she was designed to act merely as a mother, wife, and homemaker. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, demonstrates the status of women in the 19th century within society, revealing that madness in this story stems from the oppressive control of gender on woman. A woman who is trying to escape from confinement may result in madness. The use of madness characterizes women as victims of society, suffering the effects of isolation brought on by oppression driving
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.
Feminist studies generally focus on the role that hysterical diagnoses and treatments played in reinforcing the prevailing, male-dominant gender roles through the subversion, manipulation and degrading of female experience through the use of medical treatments and power structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper” is a perfect example of these themes. In writing this story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew upon her own personal experiences with hysteria. The adoption of the sick-role was a product of-and a reaction against gender norms and all of the pressures and tensions that their satisfaction demanded. Gilman’s essay uses autobiographical experiences displayed as doppelganger quality the in the main narrator of the
The prison-like setting of The Yellow Wallpaper reinforces the popular belief during the early twentieth century of mental illness as a prison—just another of Gilman’s criticisms of psychology of the time. Gilman compares the room –having a bed that is nailed to the floor, rings on the wall and a decorated yellow wallpaper to a nursery (Scott, 201). Such a description seems more like an adult asylum. The narrator expresses a dislike of the room and wishes for another with airy windows to the decline of her husband. This is evidence of the control of men over women in the patriarchal society of Gilman’s. The society at the time insisted on a rest cure, which forces the narrator to adopt to her
“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 these short stories, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing”, each have common situation about mental illness towards self, family, and even with outside of world-society. Different people handle struggles in different ways. In all the stories, freedom was taken away in one way or another. Both were struggling with inner conflicts about comforting to other people’s wants or needs. The characters in both stories hand to deal with abandonment in some form. All dealt with emotional and mental abuse. Both woman and daughter found their own way of escaping from conforming to what other people thought they should do. Both stories deal with the oppression of female. Female in these stories are all confined in one way
Cheris Kramarae, a theorist involved with the idea of the Muted Group Theory, which investigates unbalanced power – related conflicts in society, said “The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‘It’s a girl’”. These are extremely powerful words as they concisely point out the secularization that women face even before they are born. Women of all ages, culture, and religion face this injustice. Every once in the while, in a field of trampled flowers, one robust plant stands and over time grows into a strong tree that protects the other mangled flowers, helping them flourish. In the 19th century, one of these strong plants was Charlotte Perkins Gilmans, who wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to challenge the ideals of society and their treatment towards women. Gilman, faced with the discriminatory and prejudiced challenges of her gender, her childhood shadowed and pelted on with poverty, and her mind plagued with the constant, deafening humming of nervous postpartum depression, unambiguously determined that she was going to raise her voice against constant chattering of chauvinist values. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a direct echo of Gilman’s contest with the rest cure and the stifling confinement associated with it that drove her to the edge of falling into a chasm of madness. “The Yellow Wallpaper” revolves around Jane, a woman who is forced to live in solitary confinement as a way to cure her depression by her husband. She is
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a woman who has a mental illness but cannot heal due to her husband’s lack of belief. The story appears to take place during a time period where women were oppressed. Women were treated as second rate people in society during this time period. Charlotte Perkins Gilman very accurately portrays the thought process of the society during the time period in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written. Using the aspects of Feminist criticism, one can analyze “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman through the dialogue through both the male and female perspective, and through the symbol found in the story.