Jane is the name of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Jane is on the “rest cure” that was assigned by her husband and Doctor. Jane is confined in a room for the summer until she gets better. The nursery room has many different elements that makes it sound like a prison, but the main one that Jane talks about the most is the yellow wallpaper. Jane’s opinion changes through out the book on this wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper is a very important part of this story and it is repeated multiple times. It's so important that the book is named after this mysterious paper.
In the beginning Jane describes different aspects of her room. The dull yellow wallpaper then catches her eye and she starts to nitpick the pattern.
I never saw a worse paper
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“ I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.”(pg.798) She becomes memorized by the pattern. The wallpaper becomes the only thing she thinks about that she excludes herself from interaction with others. She spends her nights just staring at the paper for hours. That it even interferes with her daily functions. “There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer everyday.”(pg.797) Another reason she excludes herself is because she does not want others to have the chance to find out the pattern before she does. Jane also knows that if she tells her husband about her findings he will not believe her and he will think she is not improving in …show more content…
But once she thinks she has got the pattern it confuses her again. “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It's like a bad dream.”(pg.798) I believe she sees this because she is stir crazy from being in the same room day after day. Her imagination is starting to take over her everyday life. So because of this confusion the fascination continues to control her every movement. That she even gets to a point that she does not want to leave anymore until she understands the
In The Yellow Wallpaper Jane is sick and goes to a country house to overcome her sickness. She stays in a guest bedroom. During her stay she starts hallucinating and gets in a relationship with this woman in the wall. Every night Jane would wake up in the middle of the night. She watches the woman in the wall. Jane forms a strong relationship with the woman. As Jane watches the woman she sees that the woman is trapped. Seeing that the woman is trapped relates to her ownself in what she is going through. Her last night stay at the country house she watches the woman in the wall like she has the last several nights. She immediately starts tearing the wallpaper off the wall. After she tears it off she feels as if she is freed from this sickness that she was diagnosed with. The relationship that she formed with the woman in the wall help herself in her time of
"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.
The wallpaper is beginning to take on the role of controlling her life. As the days proceed on and she continues to sit in this isolated room, she begins to notice objects incorporated throughout the patterns. Every day the shapes become significantly clearer to her until one moment it appears to be a figure trapped within the walls (734). This aversion to the color completely shifts at this point toward hallucination. The wallpaper now has complete control of the narrator’s mind and sanity.
The purpose of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to tell the reader that you can have negative effect on someone’s mental health if they are denied their freedom of expression. This is because the narrator (Jane) was kept in a room that had yellow wallpaper, which she did not like. Soon after being unable to work or write Jane began to see creepy figures in the wallpaper and everyday it got worse, she soon began to see a women trapped in the wallpaper. This began to feed her hallucinations and paranoia that someone else is going to find out about this women, and help her escape the yellow wallpaper. This made Jane insane, she would see women walking around outside, and she soon became addicted to the room and writing about the wall in her journal.
Maybe one of the bigger underlying messages in this short story is confinement, which is represented by one of the bigger symbols,the yellow wallpaper. When Jane begins to first describe the wallpaper she says,”The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow,strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight’(Gilman 3). Jane doesn’t seem to understand what is truly eating at her and causing her depression because she feels suppressed but because it is a social norm she continues to go along with it. The yellow wallpaper is weird at first, it repels her, is revolting to her and it is strange because it seems to represent freement of confinement. Continuing on in the story Jane states, ‘There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will’(Gilman 4). Proving that the wallpaper is
When her focus eventually settles on the wallpaper in the bedroom and she states, "I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (Gilman 260). As the narrator resigns herself to her intellectual confinement, she begins to see more details in the wallpaper pattern. This can be seen as the slow shift from the connection to her family, friends and colleagues to her focus inward as she sinks deeper into depression. She describes that "—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (Gilman 262). As she focuses inward, sinking deeper into her depression the figure in the wallpaper takes shape and she states that, "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will" (Gilman 264). And she begins to describe the form of a woman behind the wallpaper pattern, "Sometimes I think there are a
“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
We know that janes was alone in her room. If a person has nervous problem like she has, the mind began to play with her. There will be point that will not know the difference between the real and the imaginary.
Reaching the end, she doesn’t really care much about what anyone thinks. She starts showing certain actions that may confirm that she going insane, like peeling off all the paper, locking the door and throwing the key in the front path. On one hand it seems that she is gone insane, on the other hand, I think she is getting out of her cage, expressing what has been there all along may be in a certain way that only satisfies her. In my own view as I discussed it before, each individual has a certain way of expressing their illness or more likely their feelings, and it comes with different ways of behaviour (outcome) depending on the person.
When Jane describes the wallpaper, she is first repulsed by its color and the mere sight of it. Later, she describes that the sunlight reveals a “pointless pattern”
She becomes obsessed with the pattern, trying to trace it with her eyes, but in her intense study of the paper she finds that “There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.” What she sees in the wallpaper becomes her secret, something that she can keep from her husband, and without his controlling influence, she is able to find an escape within the wallpaper. Now she no longer sleeps at night because she lies awake and studies the wallpaper’s pattern, what was once an ugly piece of “paper” now, metaphorically becomes her
The yellow wallpaper is a symbol of oppression in a woman who felt her duties were limited as a wife and mother. The wallpaper shows a sign of female imprisonment. Since the wallpaper is always near her, the narrator begins to analyze the reasoning behind it. Over time, she begins to realize someone is behind the
When “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins Jane seems to be quite coherent and sane but as the story progresses so does her insanity. As Jane becomes more constrained by John and others around her to do less with her day in order to rehabilitate her mental health, the woman becomes more visible to her. “But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 795). Jane begins to see something in the wallpaper around the same time that she mentions that John’s sister is taking care of her.
The yellow wallpaper symbolizes Jane’s depression and her struggle with her overwhelming mental illness. At night, Jane lies awake studying the paper desperately trying to keep watch over the woman behind it (316). Gilman shows that Jane’s depression