She begins to tear the yellow wallpaper off of the wall, claiming that there is a woman stuck behind it. The lady that the narrator is referring to is herself. Because of her disease, she is not free to do what she pleases during the summer. She is tied down to this mansion for the summer and is forced to sleep all day. When she rips all of the wallpaper off, she thinks that she can finally be free from both her husband and his sister, " I've got out at last," said I, " in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back! "(656). The author shows how eager the narrator is about being free and that it is essential for her to have a good life. The narrator needed to not be controlled by her husband, her disease, or the yellow wallpaper that haunted her day and night. In the 1800’s women having freedom was unheard of. They should be subordinate to their husbands and never go against what they say. The narrator is no different than these women. She is scared to confront her husband about her disease in fear of him lashing out at her. Since he did not believe her about her disease, she should just agree with him and move on with her life. Mental illness’ were also not taken very seriously back then. If someone was presumed to have a mental illness, they would just shove them in an insane asylum until they were
"The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.
In ?The Yellow Wallpaper? it seems that the narrator wishes to drive her husband away, spending the entire time hoping for freedom. She explains, ?John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious? (Gilman). She is glad to see her husband away so that she may be left alone to do as she pleases without interference from her husband. She is frequently rebelling against her husband?s orders. She writes in her journal and tries to move her bed when there is no one around to see. However, she always keeps an eye out for someone coming.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is about Jane who has a “nervous condition” (postpartum depression) and her journey to madness. Not only was her husband a doctor, but she went to see a doctor as well who prescribed the “rest cure”. The “rest cure” meant that she was not allowed to write, have company, or do very much of anything at all. Her bedroom was on the top floor away from everyone else and it had bars on the windows, this all made her feel isolated from the rest of the world. Something that we would today find depressing even today. Jane begins to have a fixation on the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and she believes that she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. She
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
Due to their behavior, both men lead their wives to rebel. John’s controlling behavior causes the narrator to abandon him by going completely mad. First, she questions John’s pronouncements. The narrator believes that congenial work, with excitement and change would do her good (p.297). Next, she focuses on the wallpaper. She describes its negative features noting that patches are gone as if school boys wore it out (p.298). Upset by her husband’s actions, the narrator decides to begin writing in secret. . It reaches the point where the narrator has to hide her writings from him, because he gets upset if she even writes a word (p.298). -After time passes, we see her obsession grow. John seems to be oblivious to the narrator’s conditions, telling her “you know the place is doing you good” (p.299). She notices that the pattern is torturing (p.303). Finally, she begins to see a woman hiding behind the pattern (p.304). Looking for the woman in the pattern gives her something to look forward to (p.305). Ultimately she comes to believe that she is the woman in the wallpaper and wants to free herself. She begins peeling off the paper through the night, and by morning removes all the paper she could while standing (p.307). The narrator even begins to contemplate jumping out of the window, but does not
The yellow wallpaper represents society. The gates you see her in front of the background image symbolize freedom. The lights illuminating right through the window represents the power of men. The woman behind the gates seeks escape the control of men. Also, as it becomes more complex, she begins to see women behind it which shows the problem is worse and she 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).” women trailing behind the picture shows it feels confined to the walls of the room. The narrator breaks yellow wallpaper not willing to accept how bad is her mental state. ' 'I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house ' '( Gilman ). This statement reveals the wishes of the narrator want to think independently. Here we can see how women of 19th century thought. women prefer not to think about their condition rather than fight his place in society.
Due to postpartum depression, the narrator, Jane; her husband, John; their child; and the narrator’s sister-in-law, Jennie, rent an isolated countryside estate in hopes to cure the narrator’s illness. Causing an external conflict with his wife, John forces her to live in isolation forbidding writing, working, and socializing. As a result, the narrator becomes fascinated with the wallpaper, begins to hallucinate, and believes another woman is trapped behind the patterns. Jane is hopelessly insane believing there are multiple creeping women present and that she herself has come out the wallpaper. Suspecting that John and Jennie are aware of her obsession, she resolves to destroy the paper by tearing and biting it off the wall and save the trapped women. By the end, the narrator convinces herself that she has achieved liberation freeing herself from the constraints of her marriage, society, and efforts to repress her
This is represented symbolically through the yellow wallpaper. She even realizes this about half through the story: “It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, it is the paper”(page 426)! The “It” would be the illness people thinks she has, which is directly related to the mental barriers. At the end of the story she begins to rip the wallpaper off the wall, symbolically peeling away the mental barriers. “I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of paper… I declared I would finish it to-day”(page 429)! As she finishes removing the wallpaper from the walls her husband finally comes home. As he opens the door, he realizes he is no longer in control of her when she says, ““I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back””(page 431). By this time in the story we are no longer dealing with the narrator we saw in the beginning; there is nothing left of the old narrator at this point. What we see now is the new rebellious and free spirited narrator. Also, when the narrator refers to a person named “Jane” on page 429 one could make the assumption that she was Jane. If this is the case, then the mental barriers were attached to Jane as an
In the final three sentences on “The Yellow Wallpaper” the nameless woman has peeled off all of the yellow wallpaper by biting, tearing, and smudging it. At this point in the story the reader can come to the conclusion that the wife has gone completely mentally insane. When her husband, John, comes into the room he
Her descriptions and obsessions with the wallpaper as viewed from her perspective, truly draw readers into her downward spiral to ultimate insanity. Readers follow her in her mind from a nervous condition through her mild subsequent pleadings for alternative treatment to eventually "creeping" through the wallpaper with her--experiences which readers grasp within a powerful narration indeed. Through her, and only her is precisely how readers clearly knew how she felt at the end when she says, "I've got out at last in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (330). Husband John fainted, he had no idea she had gone that far, but readers did.
The mood of the story shifted from nervous, anxious, hesitant even, to tense and secretive, and shifts again to paranoid and determination. Her anxiousness is evident whenever she talks to John. She always seems to think for lengthy time when attempting to express her concerns about her condition to him. The mood shift from anxious to secretive is clear when she writes “I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper.” (9). She wants no one to figure out the affect the wallpaper has on her and she wants to be the only one to figure out its pattern. The final mood shift to determination is obvious when she writes “But I am here, and no person must touch this paper but me – not ALIVE!” (11). She is steadfast in attempting to free the woman from the wallpaper. She even goes as far as to lock herself in the room to make sure that she is not interrupted. The major conflicts of this story are the narrator versus John over the nature of her illness and its treatment and the narrator’s internal struggle to express herself and claim independence. During the entire story her and John’s views about her treatment conflict with each other, especially when it comes to her writing. He even makes her stay in the room upstairs instead of in a prettier room downstairs that she would prefer. She often keeps her views to herself or writes them down in
On a good day, the yellow wallpaper looks pretty, but on the narrator’s bad day the yellow wallpaper looks disgusting. This shows the narrator's depression of mood swings, on days she would feel okay and then feel sad. Furthermore, the narrator would see a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper, in which the narrator sees herself in her marriage. The narrator would feel trapped at times when the narrator husband John wouldn't approve of her writing in her journal. Or when her husband wouldn’t let her work, in which she feels did good for her health. The narrator's husband would treat her as if she were a child, that needed decisions made for her, instead of letting her choose what she feels is best for her. In the story, the narrator hates the yellow wallpaper, yet wants to release the woman [herself] from behind the yellow wallpaper. At the end of the story, the narrator, locks herself in the room and rips the yellow wallpaper off the wall to release the woman, in which the narrator states, “I’ve got out at last,... in spite of you and Jane? And I’ve pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can’t put me back!”. This resulted in the husband passing out and Jane finding her sanity. Although, the narrator's development came from her releasing the lady from behind the yellow wallpaper , in which see saw herself, she found her sanity.
The yellow wallpaper is a story about John and his wife who he keeps locked up due to her "nervous condition" of anxiety. John diagnoses her as sick and has his own remedy to cure her. His remedy s to keep her inside and deterring her from almost all activities. She is not allowed to write, make decisions on her own, or interact with the outside world. John claims that her condition is improving but she knows that it is not. She eats almost nothing all day and when it is suppertime she eats a normal meal. John sees this and proclaims her appetite is improving. Later in the story, the woman creates something of an imaginary friend trapped behind the horrible looking yellow wallpaper in
In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman creates a character of a young depressed woman, on the road to a rural area with her husband, so that she can be away from writing, which appears to have a negative effect on her psychological state. Lanser says her husband “heads a litany of benevolent prescriptions that keep the narrator infantilized, immobilized, and bored literally out of her mind. Reading or writing herself upon the wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance” (432). In the story both theme and point of view connect and combine to establish a powerful picture of an almost prison-type of treatment for conquering depression. In the story, Jane battles with male domination, because she is informed by both her husband and brother countless brain shattering things about her own condition that she does not agree with. She makes every effort to become independent, and she desires to escape from the burdens of that domination. The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the character’s point of view in a structure similar to a diary, which explains her time spent in her home. The house is huge and old with annoying yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. The character thinks that there is a woman behind bars in the design of the wallpaper. She devotes a great deal of her