The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a great example of early works pertaining to feminism and the disease of insanity. Charlotte Gilman’s own struggles as a woman, mother, and wife shine through in this short story capturing the haunting realism of a mental breakdown.The main character, much like Gilman herself, slips into bouts of depression after the birth of her child and is prescribed a ‘rest cure’ to relieve the young woman of her suffering. Any use of the mind or source of stimulus is strictly prohibited, including the narrator’s favorite hobby of writing. The woman’s husband, a physician, installs into his wife that the rest treatment is correct and will only due harm if not followed through. This type of treatment ultimately drives the woman insane, causing her to envision a woman crawling behind the yellow wallpaper of her room. Powerlessness and repression the main character is subject to creates an even more poignant message through the narrator’s mental breakdown. The ever present theme of subordination of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is advanced throughout the story by the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

The surroundings which one is placed in can drastically contribute to their mental state. Deterioration and a lack of stimulation will be reciprocated within the mind of the inhabitant. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, depicts a young, unnamed woman who is suffering with post-partum depression. In this time period, the treatment of mental illness typically did more harm than good as electroshock therapy, and the rest cure were the classic treatments of choice. Similarly, William Faulkner, the author of “A Rose for Emily”, written in 1930, gives the reader an inside look upon an elderly woman experiencing mental distress. Although there are major signs of an issue being present within Miss Emily’s old, southern house, the town chooses to ignore and cover them up as to not disrupt the elderly woman who buys poisons without a reason and sleeps next to the dead corpse of her lover. Theme and setting play two very distinct and important roles within each of these stories allowing the reader to have a more complete understanding of the message the author is trying to convey.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the setting is very symbolic when analyzing the different the meanings of this book. The main character in the story is sick with nervous depression. In the story, John, her husband, and also a physician, takes his wife to a house in the middle of the summer and confines her to one room in hopes of perfect rest for her. As the story progresses, it is made clear that confinement, sanity, insanity, and freedom are all tied together and used to make the setting of the story symbolic.

treats her like a child and just like a child she is kept in this

Charlotte Perkins Gilman starts “The Yellow Wallpaper” with the narrative of a character in first person perspective. Gilman writes in a style and attitude that is reflective of the character 's feelings towards her current situation. The character’s doctor who is coincidentally her husband decided it was best to move her into a remote house for some time away to get plenty of rest and to heal mentally. The character was moved into a nursery that was covered with yellow wallpaper and as time passed the character started to go insane from the seclusion. The character in the story describes her relationship with her husband, John, while explaining how she feels towards him after he excluded her. The character’s sanity transforms into an irrational mentality after her attitude transitions from positive to negative, from her husband’s condescending tone and excessive control, and when she is left constantly alone in seclusion causing her to hallucinate.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator of the text was seen as a woman who suffered from an illness that she identifies as real, but her blinded husband, John, thought she wasn’t sick and all she needed was to rest for a while. As the text progressed, the narrator began to connect to the yellow wallpaper in the nursery room she was staying at, seeing things move within the wallpaper and even seeing women trapped within it as well. The narrator’s illness progressively got worse as she had to stay strong and fight her illness by herself since her husband and his sister, Jennie, were no good for help and she would get judged harshly for showing any signs of a mental illness as a woman. Many symbols could be seen from the narrator seeing delusional things within the text, such as the women in the wallpaper shaking the bars within it like they’re in a prison and the women only being calm in the daytime, but restless in the evening. These symbols gave a strong rise to that fact that the narrator was actually sick and suffered a condition that would be called postpartum depression in today’s time, but due to her inability to talk to her husband and his sister about her illness and/or concerns and the fear of being harshly judged by society for being sick, her illness caused her to go insane from locking all the thoughts and feelings inside of her. Society, which included her husband and his sister, was to blame for the narrator going insane, since the

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a woman with mental illness that only gets worse as time goes on written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator’s husband, who is also her doctor, tries to help her but what he does only hinders her. This story is narrated by the mentally unstable wife, trapped in her home. She starts off by writing journals, even though her husband tells her not too. In The Yellow Wallpaper she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom. The theme of The Yellow Wallpaper is obsession and depression.

Feminism is one of the most controversial topics of our time or any time. Traditionally and incorrectly thought of as a system where women lord over men, Feminism in reality stands for the political, economic, and social equality of both sexes. One of the most famous feminist texts of all time is The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Telling a story about a woman’s private war against a male dominated world and against backwards thinking and societal expectations, this story stands out as one of the few feminist texts of its time. The story revolves around a nameless, female Narrator, who is driven mad by her husband John’s attempts to help and “cure” her alleged mental issues with the aid of the infamous rest cure. Through the feminist lens of the story, the reader can see how the established gender politics and medical sciences of Gilman’s time period could have devastating and horrific effects on women, irregardless of any good intention.

Madness is what essentially haunts humans. Whether they are born with it or it is brought upon, it leaves a blurred rush of lunacy in its habitants minds. Competently so, a handful of these beings can write and express these tangled minds into compositions that leave the reader cognized and fascinated. Respectably, an author that always seems to come along any viewer’s mind is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, known especially for her controversial short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. The piece deals with a woman who is on a forced vacation from her conventional role as a wife and a mother, diagnosed and treated by her doctor as well as her husband for a slight case of depression. Her primary “treatment” for this is predominantly a week-long stay in an ugly, yellow wallpaper-covered secluded room where she sits and “rests” mostly alone for an extended period of time. In the story, Gilman confronts ideas of isolation from her main character’s world, drawing out attributes from wallpaper and its designs to represent the escape from the society in which she lives in. Alike, she also ties the ideas of loneliness into this character’s stream-of-consciousness by discussing her situation in a passive mindset. Moreover, by using different symbols and stream-of-consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates the deterioration of a female’s mental health when forced into isolation in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Throughout the course of history, gender roles have seen a drastic reform and reversal. The late 19th century and early 20th century have represented a time period where American women were restricted to common household jobs, and prevented from being part of much social or economical progress. Women were expected to maintain an image of moral standard and were frequently cast in an insignificant role in society, ironically, due to the worries men had with the higher population of women ("Women in the Twentieth Century and Beyond." 1). As a strong advocate for women 's rights, Charlotte Perkins Gilman played a significant role as she fought against the common, marginalized label that had been put on women during the time period. In her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", Perkins utilizes recurring, vivid imagery to highlight the theme of the unjust isolation of women. With the use of a distant house, a secluded garden, a shut window, and a useless wallpaper, Perkins conveys the message that the 20th century was plagued with the oppression of men by the social segregation of women in the United States. The century marked an era of deterioration of not only the emotional well being of women, but also caused detrimental mental issues as well.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the most renown short story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). It starts as a spine-chilling probably-horror-story that then becomes, even more, terrifying when we realize what extremes human mind can reach when put in inadequate conditions, even without any supernatural elements to interfere. We’ve learned from Charlotte Perkins’ article “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” that there was a lot of speculation held about the motives behind this short story, so she decided to shed some light on it.

The 19th century was a man’s world and it seemed that women just lived in it. Women were expected to fall into gender roles that society had created for them. While these gender roles are not as enforced today, they were the standard norms for the everyday man and woman in the 19th century. Due to these gender roles, women were heavily oppressed by society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman experienced this oppression, especially while trying to deal with her post-partum depression. As a result, she was inspired to write the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in which she tells the tale of a woman that has a severe mental break due to her mental illness. The narrator is also heavily oppressed by her husband and represents the society of her time. “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses the oppression of women through the husband’s control over the narrator in which she is isolated, treated as a child, and forced to partake in a harmful treatment of her condition.

People are constantly changing, whether it is physically, emotionally, or entirely. Different events in a person’s life will cause them to change their character for the better or sometimes for worse. Most of the time one does not have control over the events that force them change, but one does have control over how they change. For Jane, it was the opposite. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane’s final shift in character is brought about by external events and her susceptibility to a powerful paranormal being. Jane goes through a series of events that were beyond her control and combined with her weakened mental state cause a forceful shift in her character that was not in her control.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” what is hoped to be a dream vacation for relaxation becomes a nightmare for the protagonist. This protagonist, who plays the role of narrator, is in the midst of a nervous breakdown who has left her village for recovery. The narrator, along with her husband, lives in a house that they have taken on rent so that she can recover efficiently. During this period, the protagonist passes her time observing the yellow wallpaper and after some time of observation, she finds attractive patterns in that wallpaper which changes with light that falls on it during night and day. The protagonist becomes so acquainted with that pattern that she sleeps all day and wakes up all night to observe the changes that happen in that pattern. After some time, the narrator gets much tired with the place that she wants to leave that house even if they have rented it for three months. On the other hand, pattern in the yellow wallpaper keeps the protagonist’s interest in that house which was a headache for her and she lives there for three months only to observe the pattern which changes with sunlight.

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we never learn the narrators’ name, which begs the question could Gilman be narrating her own life. The tale was written in the late eighteen hundreds as a private diary of sorts and is a lugubrious narration about a woman who has quite possibly went mad. The narrator’s husband John and her brother both respected physician diagnosis her with nervous depression and at the time, a Victorian era of time, the cure for losing one’s mind was to rest. While she may have indeed been suffering from depression which dictionary.com defines as “sad and gloomy; dejected; downcast” (dictoionarycomdepression) she just had a child so she may have actually been suffering from postpartum depression. Due to her diagnosis and because she tired so easily, she was forbidden from working, her attempts at conversations were stifled and her hallowed writing was even frowned upon.