The Yellow Wall Paper By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The brain is a strong but delicate muscle inside the human body. However, if this muscle gets overworked it will affect the overall persona of that individual. Depression or any other mental diseases are not diagnoses or setbacks that should be taken lightly. Back in the 1800’s and 1900’s medicine and the knowledge of the individuals that decided to practice medicine was not extensive. Due to medicine, not being as advanced as it is today, a lot of patients were getting treating improperly. The character within The Yellow Wallpaper is a great example of not only a mental disease but also malpractice. Although the main character within The Yellow Wallpaper may be a woman of high social status, the narrator goes mad for the following reasons: she is extremely drugged with improper medicine, she lacks autonomy, and her post-partum depression escalates. Some might say that the story of The Yellow Wallpaper is simplistic, however, it can also be viewed that the simplicity of the story is what makes it complicated and comprehensive.

The "Yellow Wall Paper "by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression. The setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the driving force in the story because it is the main factor that caused the narrator to go insane.

“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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Bishop, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lorraine Hansberry each have characters whose romantic relationships are in a state of crisis. For Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the relationship in crisis is the narrator and her husband, John. The speaker of “One Art” by Bishop is moving on from a crisis with a lover. Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s relationship is also in a crisis in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth and Walter Lee’s marriage is at a critical point and may fall apart at any moment. Each couple makes unique decisions about the situation they are in and determines if the relationship will stand the final test.

    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).

The failed diagnosis led to the narrator’s baby being nurtured by a nursemaid. As a result of her inability to care for her own child, the narrator descended into emotional chaos as would be expected of any mother. Another case of the narrator’s emotional deterioration results from her being “deprived of the freedom to write openly, which she believes would be therapeutic,” (Werlock2). Without writing, the narrator looks to her room for guidance. She develops an emotional attachment for the yellow wallpaper as it “both intrigues and repels her; it becomes the medium on which she symbolically inscribes her ‘text.’” As the story progresses, “she detects a subpattern in the wallpaper that crystallizes into the image of an imprisoned woman attempting to escape.” Eventually, as her emotional distraught increases, “the narrator's identity merges with that of the entrapped woman, and together they frantically tear the paper from the walls.” The narrator’s postpartum depression and inability to write openly led her into an emotional insanity in which she became vulnerable and developed an obsession for the yellow wallpaper.

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the

[Rough Draft] Critical Essay [Short Story] The yellow wallpaper [Thesis] In the following essay, Martello-Wramage argues the assumption that the narrator becomes hopelessly insane by the end of the story, the mistreatment she experienced by her husband slowly lead her into a nervous breakdown and that there are fine signs that point to narrator's behavior that indicate her mental breakdown was not insanity, but a sudden epiphany.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provides an insight into the life of the narrator- a woman suppressed and unable to express herself because of her controlling husband- leading the reader down her fall to insanity, allowing for her inner conflict to be clearly expressed. The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story develops.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story of a woman with a mental illness and her husband’s use of the adverse rest cure. The husband, John, forced her to rest, remain in solidarity and did not allow her to write anything. In

The description of the house by the woman is positively somehow. However, she is disturbed by some elements such as; “the rings and things” in the walls, and that the bars on the windows keep showing up. In addition, what was disturbing her the most is the yellow wall paper which is creepy with a formless pattern and that leads her to be totally insane. Readers are introduced to the woman’s desperate thoughts and feelings, yet her husband came and interrupted her thoughts and she was forced to stop writing. Furthermore, she always complains that her husband John who is a physician belittles her illness, her own thoughts and that makes her more depressed. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a deep feminist story that shows the unequal relationship between women and men in the 19th century and uses the yellow

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 “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator, our main character, has many inner conflicts such as postpartum depression and the want for freedom. She suffers from these inner conflicts because of her husband who tells her what she must do. For example in the story, he decides to take the narrator to a colonial mansion to put her on a rest cure. Although the narrator dislikes the place, she does not have a choice. The narrator is closed off from what is happening around her and begins to find herself within a wallpaper.

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.

In The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman described a development of a madness of an unnamed woman. Yellow wallpapers were shown as the main catalyst of her disorder. Their color and pattern irritated the character from the beginning and made her condition worse. While yellow wallpapers became the main object of the short story, as they appeared in its name and “occupied” a major part of text, a little deeper analysis shows they are not the key problem. Characters interactions were the real reason of the development of the character’s mental disorder.