Sigmund Freud Uncanny In Literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the life and mind of a woman suffering from post-partum depression in the late eighteenth century. Gilman uses setting to strengthen the impact of her story by allowing the distant country mansion symbolize the loneliness of her narrator, Jane. Gilman also uses flat characters to enhance the depth of Jane’s thoughts; however, Gilman’s use of narrative technique impacts her story the most. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses interior monologue to add impact to Jane’s progression into insanity, to add insight into the relationships in the story, and to increase the depth of Jane’s connection with the yellow wallpaper it self.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, dank room covered in musty wallpaper all play important parts in driving the wife insane. The husband's smothering attention, combined with the isolated environment, incites the nervous nature of the wife, causing her to plunge into insanity to the point she sees herself in the wallpaper. The author's masterful use of not only the setting (of both time and place), but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to participate in the woman's growing insanity.

The vivid descriptions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” help to bring the reader along in the narrators decent into a kind of psychosis. It starts mildly, with her describing the color of wallpaper as “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 528). As more time passes she begins to see more things in the paper such as “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes start at you,” and for it have “so much expression in an inanimate thing” (Gilman 592). As the pattern and descriptions get more twisted, we get visual clues of the madness that is slowly consuming the narrator. The color of the paper even begins to become a physical thing she can smell descried as, “creep[ing] all over the house...sulking...hiding...lying in wait for me…It gets into my hair” (Gilman 534). In the end we get a graphic visual representation of her full psychosis

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator must deal with several different conflicts. She is diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 221). Most of her conflicts, such as, differentiating from creativity and reality, her sense of entrapment by her husband, and not fitting in with the stereotypical role of women in her time, are centered around her mental illness and she has to deal with them.

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

The geographical, physical, and historical settings in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" were more than the primary character could handle. The geography would lead to think she could enjoy the environment, but she chose not to. The physical setting showed us the reader just how grotesque and unbearable it would be to live a room in which the wallpaper to over the narrators mind. Lastly, we looked at how historically women were not allowed to speak their minds about how they felt. Maybe now that John has seen his wife go completely insane for himself he will finally seek extra attention for

When a person experiences chills or goose bumps as a reaction to something strange or unusual, they are being affected by a sense of uncanniness. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud endeavored to explain this feeling of uncanniness in his essay entitled “The Uncanny”. Freud’s theory focuses around two different causes for this reaction. Freud attributes the feeling of uncanniness to repressed infantile complexes that have been revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. The first point of his theory that Freud discusses in the essay is the repression of infantile complexes that cause an uncanny experience.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's "The Yellow Wallpaper," relays to the reader something more than a simple story of a woman at the mercy of the limited medical knowledge in the late 1800 's. Gilman creates a character that expresses real emotions and a psyche that can be examined in the context of modern understanding. "The Yellow Wallpaper," written in first person and first published in 1892 in the January edition of the New England Magazine, depicts the downward spiral of depression, loss of control and competence, and feelings of worthlessness that lead to greater depression and the possibility of schizophrenia.

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, was secretly written because her husband John didn’t allow her to write. As told by male doctors, Charlotte found out that she had a temporary nervous depression. Therefore, no matter how many doctors tell her she is sick, her husband John will not believe her. John made Charlotte and their child move to an old abandoned house, where Charlotte has always felt that something was weird about the house, as if the house was haunted. John was not like most husbands, he treated her like she was stupid and would not allow her to do anything. Charlotte felt as if she was a nobody because of how he treated her; also, how he always downed her. John treated her as if she wasn’t important.

As the protagonist suffers from her “nervous condition”, the isolated environment causes her to only get worse. Being trapped in the bedroom with yellow wallpaper contributes her emotional distress to become overpowering. The inability to verbally express her feelings of loneliness causes her to write in a more creative way about her relationships with objects in the room, specifically the yellow wallpaper. She begins to write about the yellow wallpaper as if it is suppose to have some sort of significance, in which it does. In the beginning of the narrator’s isolation, her attention is focused on the details of the yellow wallpaper’s pattern that are “dull enough to confused the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study” (438). The wallpaper’s characteristics become hard to

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator talks about several things: She feels she is sick and her brother and husband do not believe her, her husband moved her to a deserted house and keeps her isolated, he controls her every move, and she feels that she has no companionship. All of these things contribute to the theme of alienation and loneliness in this story.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses symbols to portray recovery from the depth of mental illness. The main character, Jane, struggles throughout the story with severe depression. She is constantly haunted by the room she has to occupy during her stay. Yet despite it all, Jane sets herself free from her illness’s grasp. Gilman employs the symbols of the yellow wallpaper, the ripping of the yellow wallpaper, and the beautiful door to depict Jane’s journey out of her depression.

In the “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are many of literary techniques that illustrates the theme to express the story. Irony, imagery and symbolism are some literary devices that is presented among the story.  “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 acceptance and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The story appears to take place during a time where women were oppressed. Women were treated as if they were under one’s thumb in society during this period which is approximately the 19th century.

Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” is a highly influential and valued in psychoanalysis and literature. As Freud explains, it reveals much about his understanding of human beings as being essentially determined by their fears and unconscious desires. His interpretation of uncanny can be analyzed in two ways: linguistic and actual. In the beginning, he starts with the term “uncanny”, which is taken from German word “unheimlich”, literally meaning “un-home-like” – something unfamiliar and unknown, never experienced before. The problem is that the definition of the word and the linguistic peculiarities take half of the whole reading, so we get to the point after the second half.