Analysis Of The Yellow Wall-Paper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Jane's illness was also doubted by her family. Jane writes that her husband "does not believe I am sick!" (Perkins Gilman 424) though she does not mention her concerns on the subject with him. Jane is upset because John, "a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one" (425). Her brother, also a doctor, agrees with John's report on Jane. John even comments that Jane "shall be as sick as she pleases" (430). Jane continues to hear

“In one of the articles, John is a perfect example of a commanding mate, a husband who holds absolute power over his wife. He treats her as an minor, as seen here: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” John sees his wife’s feelings as laughable, never taking them seriously until it is too late. It is also clear from this statement that John laughs at his wife because it is what is expected by the community. Later, when Jane is qualified to control her own thoughts, his role as a strong, higher ranked husband and leader is switched, and he becomes much like a woman himself: “Now why should that man have fainted?” Having seen his wife in a state of dementia (symbolically, shattering the power he has over her), he faints, much like a woman would be expected to. Due to acceptance of her insanity, Jane has changed the traditional roles of husband

He had even hired a housekeeper to take care of not only the house, but the baby as well. John also controlled almost everything in her life. In fact, the only thing he did not control was her journal writing, and even then she had to hide it from him since he did not approve of it. When he comes she says, "I must put this (the journal) away - he hates to have me write a word"(471). Part of John's problem 1s that he is a doctor. As a doctor, he control's his wife's health care, prescribing her medicines and her overall cure. As her husband, he is too emotionally involved to look at the case objectively, or if he had, he might have seen her mind going before it was too late. Not only that, the accepted "cure" at that particular time was ineffective and would only serve to make his wife worse (473). This "cure" was the product of a certain Dr. Weir Mitchell; a nerve specialist whose theory of a "rest cure" for mentally unstable patients was later found to be unsuccessful. In the story, the husband's ill-advised attempts to treat his wife's symptoms drive her insane by taking all responsibility from her and forcing isolation upon her as a part of her "cure."

Jane was not only resented but also lacking any kind of love to balance her out. We know this right away when she is reading her book and she notes "there were certain introductory pages I could not pass quite as a blank. They were

    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).

Every request the woman in the story has made to her husband has been dismissed and her depression continues to worsen because she has lost control of her own life. John fails to understand how it feels for his wife to be trapped in her room all day. “He forces his wife into a daily confinement by four walls whose paper, described as ‘debased Romanesque,’ is an omnipresent figuring of the

“The Yellow Wall-paper” is an amazing story that demonstrates how close-minded the world was a little over a hundred years ago. In the late eighteen hundreds, women were seen as personal objects that are not capable of making a mark in the world. If a woman did prove to be a strong intellectual person and had a promising future, they were shut out from society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her stories from experience, but added fictional twists along the way to make her stories interesting.

The unequal relationship between the narrator and John is a miniature of the larger gender inequity in society. Gilman makes it clear that much of John’s condescending and paternal behavior toward his wife has little to do with her illness. He dismisses her well-thought-out opinions and her “flights of fancy” with equal disdain, while he demeans her creative impulses. He speaks of her as he would a child, calling her his “little girl” and saying of her, “Bless her little heart.” He overrides her judgments on the best course of treatment for herself as he would on any issue, making her live in a house she does not like, in a room she detests, and in an isolated environment, which makes her unhappy and

John, the narrator’s controlling, but loving, husband represents the atypical man of the time. He wants his wife to get better and to be able to fill the role of the perfect wife that society expected from her. John, being a doctor, did not quite believe that her mental illness was out of her control and insisted on

John’s domineering personality is seen throughout the story. He denies her choice of bedrooms at their rented home and “hardly lets me stir without special direction.” (Gilman 845) The most profound example of control is shown with

Continual physical abuse gave her injuries, such as bruising and broken bones which she had to hide in public in order to avoid suspicion from friends. A constant fear of other people finding out about the dysfunctional relationship limited her social interactions with people other than her immediate family. This fear isolated her, accentuating her feelings of helplessness during times of trouble, clinging to the idea that everything is fine and he will calm down. Her husband would go from loving Jane wholeheartedly to being determined to kill her, this rollercoaster of emotions made Jane feel confused about what he actually thought about her. These constant threats and confrontations from her husband made Jane and the children feel extremely unsafe, Jane described her experience as gut wrenchingly stressful every waking hour she

seems that John is very controlling and doesn't pay true attention to his wife. The illnesses of both the

      In comparison to “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Henrik Ibsen also brilliantly dramatizes the link between

“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.

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