How John`s attitude toward the narrator in ‘’The Yellow Wallpaper’’ mirrors social attitudes regarding mental illnesses

John’s seemingly overwhelming need to ensure she is healthy mentally and physically, drives him to control all aspects of her life. He has his sister come to the mansion to keep an eye on his wife while he’s away in town with his patients. John chose the mansion for its isolation and privacy as he needs to have his wife healthy or it could affect his reputation,. He also picked the nursery as their bedroom as another way to have his wife secluded. The location of the room is on the uppermost level of the house with stairs are gated at the top. There are also bars on the windows as if it is a jail. There is busy ugly peeling yellow wallpaper around the room and they’ve moved in furniture from downstairs. She pleads with John to allow her to stay in the lovely room with veranda on the lower floor. He argues that the nursery with the windows, air and sunlight will be much better for her and he may need a second bed or room for himself. As a compromise, he tells her she could have the cellar whitewashed (239). Either place, the nursery or the cellar, is a prison, which the asylums of the time resembled. John is just containing his wife the only way he knows given his status as a physician. He loves and cares for her and needs her to recover and take care of the family. John is exerting himself by pushing her back into the role she has agreed to by being his

Also, we can relate the woman in the wallpaper to the narrator because she is free to do what she wants because John is not there, but during the night she is locked up in her room much like the woman in the wallpaper. These circumstances in which the narrator was put under during the late 1800's would not have been an oddity, and therefore I believe many women just as the narrator did would have had problems go undiagnosed.

She has been trained to trust in her husband blindly and sees no other way. He calls her “little girl” (352) and “little goose” (349) and states “She will be as sick as she pleases!” (352) whenever she tries to express her issues. Instead of fighting for what she thinks will make her better she accepts it and keeps pushing her feelings aside, while he treats her like a child. We get an instant feel for her problem in the first page when she says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that” (pg 346). A woman shouldn’t expect her husband to laugh at her concerns. Even after briefly writing about her condition she remembers her husband telling her the very worst thing she can do is think about it and follows his instructions. This is when she begins to focus on the house instead of her problems and the obsession with the wallpaper starts. She has nothing else to think about alone in the home; they don’t even allow her to write, which she has to do in secret.

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

He even becomes upset when she wishes to write, causing this story to be "composed" of writings she manages to do in secret.  John places her in the attic of the mansion, like a dirty secret, in what she believes to be a former nursery.  There is, however, strong evidence that the narrator is not the first mental patient to occupy the room - there are bars on the windows and gouges in the floor and walls; the bed is bolted down and has been gnawed on and the wallpaper has been torn off in patches.

Mental illness Mental illness becomes a bigger issue with a long lasting cultural stereotyped due to the manner in which it has long been labelled (Miles, 1988). Although mental illness is very much connected to instabilities in one’s mental health state, as previously mentioned, a person can be mentally healthy but still suffer from a mental illness. What is understood by mental illness is that it

Deep-seated in these She speaks as though her opinions to do not count anyway, but she is very accepting of this. She belittles herself several more times throughout the story. "I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and her I am a comparative burden already" (Barnet 747). Having read the text through to the end we know that she is in a mental hospital, a reader could most likely begin to imagine what John may have been thinking to have witnessed his wife go through such disturbing mental anguish and that he was only going off of the knowledge available at this point in time. How would the story be different if it had been written from John’s point of view?

The narrator feels very imprisoned in the house and tries to find a way to escape it. During the narrator’s rest cure treatment, she has attached herself to the wallpaper: She would “lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately”(260-261). This was the narrator’s way of escaping the oppression she was in. The wallpaper often seemed confusing to her, but she was determined to figure it out: “I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself”(301-302), everytime John takes of her illness lightly, her interest in the wallpaper grows. This is a direct reflection of her loneliness and isolation from her treatment. The speaker’s rest cure treatment directed her not to do any activities that would make her think intellectually or imaginatively, so she is forced to stay isolated from people, books, and chores. However, as her loneliness grows intensely, she finds relief in writing, something she was told not to do. The narrator would often have to hide the fact that she writes when nobody's around, and when someone comes while she is writing she records “I must not let [them] find me writing”(141-142). The oppression the narrator has been put through has made her stronger mentally, she starts to become more and more possessive of the wallpaper and tries

The short documentary Crooked Beauty, directed by Ken Paul Rosenthal, narrates Jacks Ashley McNamara’s experience in a psychiatric ward and how her time in the facility shapes her new appreciation for her mental illness. One controversial issue has been trying to identify the true cause of mental illness. On the

If you read the diary of a high school girl, what could you learn about her? The name of her best friend, what kind of a person she is, and maybe even signs of troubles deeper than the bad grade she got on her last chemistry exam would pop out

Control in The Yellow Wallpaper John is introduced into the story by the narrator as soon as the story starts. The narrator describes him as "practical in the extreme." He has "no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talks of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." Although the narrator describes him as these things, they are married and she, undoubtedly, loves him. She continues on by saying " John is a physician and perhaps... that is one reason I do not get well faster." This description paints the husband, John, as controlling over his wife.

            In order to treat this "temporary nervous depression," John isolates her from society and orders her to do nothing but rest.  He even becomes upset when she wishes to write, causing this story to be "composed" of writings she manages to do in secret.  John places her in the attic of the mansion, like a dirty secret, in what she believes to be a former nursery.  There is, however, strong evidence that the narrator is not the first mental patient to occupy the room.  There are bars on the windows, gouges in the floor and walls, and rings fastened to the walls; the bed is bolted down and has been gnawed on, and the wallpaper has been torn off in patches.

The narrator describes the entire mansion from the hedges to the gates, to the garden as “the most beautiful place ever”. All of it is beautiful except for the bedroom in which she is kept in, but again the room selection was not her choice. “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.” The room had previously been a child’s nursery, and had bars on the window. Though she recently had a child, her newborn did not occupy this nursery. The baby was looked after by Johns’ sister, something he had also arranged, and the narrator had very little contact with her child. As the story progresses, the narrator begins to fill more and more trapped by the room and completely obsessed with the “repellent, almost revolting” yellow wallpaper that surrounds her. In many of her secret

In addition, the narrator also mentions that the room she stays in used to be a nursery, “it was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children” (479). This is significant to the setting of the story, because we are able to connect the fact that he put her in a room that used to be a nursery, with the way he treats her. Throughout the story, we see that john treats his wife as a child and degrades her maturity level. He would call her “little goose” or “little girl” which often comes across as dismissive. He treats her like a child and nothing like his wife or even an adult; therefore it’s no surprise that the narrator’s bedroom used be a nursery with a bed nailed to the floor,

The story is narrated by the wife of the of John, and represented as weak and foolish. John her husband is a doctor. He doesn't and of her suggestions or concerns about her illness in general. She contrasted his practical, rational manner to her more frivolous and sensitive ways. She was not allowed to voice what she truly felt and this was evident when she said, “There comes John, and I must put this away-he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman, 1892/2013, p. 487 ). Throughout the story her subservience to her husband was felt. The image of the woman she sees behind the yellow wallpaper represents image of herself, locked up within the walls of her room and societal norms. Recognizing her oppression, she also determined that she must take steps to change her position. She began standing up for herself when she showed disobedience to her husband and ignored his request to open the door. Finding the voice to tell him to get the key in the front to open the door shows how, for the first time, she was in control and she took pleasure in it. Then she is really set free when her husband walks in a dies and she crawls over him. That really displayed she was going against societal norms and was breaking new ground for women of that time period. Expressing her actual thoughts through writing helped her discover that she could be so much more than what