The Yellow Wallpaper, By Lee Smith And Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Whether a story is written short or long, in a novel, or in a movie, it always has a main theme that attracts the reader. The theme helps connect all the plots together to come to a final resolution. Being lonely, isolated and unwanted are the feelings that most affect people. Loneliness is about feeling disconnected from the rest of the world. Being isolated have a negative impact on society, but it will also have a negative impact on the person being isolated. The two short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Ms. Brill” by Katherine Mansfield focuses on the way two women experience loneliness, isolation, and social expectation in their society. Social expectations may hold back women from achieving their fullest potential because they are obligated to stand by a series of rules that may be counter-productive to them. Throughout these two stories, the readers are able to see a lot of similarities between the stories just that they are presented in different ways.

She has been trained to trust in her husband blindly and sees no other way. He calls her “little girl” (352) and “little goose” (349) and states “She will be as sick as she pleases!” (352) whenever she tries to express her issues. Instead of fighting for what she thinks will make her better she accepts it and keeps pushing her feelings aside, while he treats her like a child. We get an instant feel for her problem in the first page when she says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that” (pg 346). A woman shouldn’t expect her husband to laugh at her concerns. Even after briefly writing about her condition she remembers her husband telling her the very worst thing she can do is think about it and follows his instructions. This is when she begins to focus on the house instead of her problems and the obsession with the wallpaper starts. She has nothing else to think about alone in the home; they don’t even allow her to write, which she has to do in secret.

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.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a woman who writes about personal experience, and in her short, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we learn exactly who our author is based on the language and communication that appears throughout the story. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a captivating tale, largely because the language and communication between characters translates to a feeling of near madness for the reader. The man, the dominant character in the story, has much to say about his wife’s mental condition and practically refuses to permit her feelings. Gilman explains how this story wasn’t made to drive people insane, but rather to save people from insanity. She realizes she has the power to create a powerful effect within literature and that is the thing that

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860, in the city of Hartford, CT. She would later move to California. She would end her own life in 1935, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought for women’s rights and was an advocate of socialism. She wrote novels, poetry and short stories. She was a woman who was educated; her writing reflected her knowledge, relating to her strong thoughts on woman’s rights and independence and how women of Victorian times suffered from this lack of rights. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys her views on feminism and how women are treated through characters who represent this treatment. The characters she uses help the reader really get drawn into her story;

This just shows how she is not considered to know what is best, even for her own mental health. She does not even realize that this is happening. She just says things like "And what can one do?" (Gilman 317) or "But what does one do?” (Gilman 317). I believe the entire purpose for her mental health problems lies in the fact that she is trying to hold back the feeling that she cannot express herself or give an opinion about her own problems. In American Literature Research and Analysis Web Site, Wohlpart claims that prior to the twentieth century, men assigned and defined women’s roles. It is considered improper for a woman to openly express dissatisfaction and anger. She says at the bottom of page 317 that she gets "unreasonably angry with John sometimes" and she blames it on her "nervous condition.” John tells her not to "neglect proper self control" (Gilman 317). So she is not allowed to express herself in speech nor in her writing, which I think she used for comfort and as a release. The mental-battle with doing what is considered proper and what she wants to do is what is slowly driving her crazy.

Perhaps if her mother wasn’t drunk most of the time, she may have been able to re direct her in to a better frame of mind. Charlotte is a young lady and not yet considered an adult. According to our text “The search for an identity during adolescence is aided by a psychosocial moratorium, which is Erikson’s term for the gap between childhood security and adult autonomy.” (Santrock, J, 2014) My honest opinion, I think that Charlotte was searching for her identity and was deeply confused by her home life. Unfortunately, there are so many young people in the world today that have that need to be in control. Sometimes, the things we see in the end are just like her behavior when she was driving dangerously because she was getting dumped. Most people assume that when you have it all like her, you have this perfect life. That wasn’t the case here, so I think that with all opportunities that her family may have been able to afford she just didn’t thrive because she could get away with what she wanted too and that damaged her in a way that could possibly shape her adult life.

Motivation Charlotte got very depressed when she was with her husband, so she went to her friends house for a couple months. During this time she and her friend started to write like they use to and she was motivated to do so. Therefore, she was able to get back into her writing stories about how she saw her life and what she believed in most, “According to Gilman, reform can come only when people are willing to be open-minded and reject established definitions” (Kester-Shelton, ed., 1996). When she was writing and speaking she had very strong opinions about women's equality and what they deserved. The main thing that really motivated her was to be able to show equality through her writing.

Humans are flawed individuals. Although flaws can be bad, people learn and grow from the mistakes made. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, gives one a true look at using flaws to help one grow. Gilman gives her reader’s a glimpse into what her life would have consisted of for a period of time in her life. Women were of little importance other than to clean the house and to reproduce. This story intertwines the reality of what the lives of woman who were considered to be suffering mental disorders were like and elements that make one as a reader feel as though they are living the hell that Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived herself. This story can be interpreted several different ways, yet one can ultimately realize that Gilman’s goal was to show the horrors she faced. Looking at the life that Gilman lived, one better comes to understand what “The Yellow Wallpaper” is truly about.

It is ironic that Jane is staying in a nursery. Gilman writes, “It was a nursery first… for the windows are barred for little children…” (311). Nurseries are for children, and Jane is not a child. John is the one that refused to move to another room. By not letting Jane move rooms, John controls her to the point of insanity because the wallpaper in the nursery drives Jane insane. John talks to Jane like a child. Gilman writes, “’Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug” (316). This is ironic because Jane is his wife, and he speaks to her like a child. Although Jane is his wife, she lets him speak to her like this because she thinks he is showing affection. In reality, John is just dismissing her illness and making it worse. Jane breaks from reality and begins crawling like a child. Gilman writes, “I kept on creeping just the same…” (320). When Jane finally breaks and succumbs to her mental illness, she detaches from reality. Jane begins to crawl like the woman in the wall or like a child would. This is ironic because Jane is an adult and when her mental state broke she began acting like a child because that’s how her husband treated

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

In the 1800s, people knew absolutely nothing about mental illness. Benjamin Rush and Dorothea Dix came along and changed the psychological world forever. The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1892, by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, wrote this short story after suffering from her own “personal nervous breakdown in 1885. It is a semi-autobiographical record of psychiatric treatment and the descent into ‘madness’.” In that time, little relief and help was available. Gilman emphasizes that fear has copious power through the devices of imagery, the ghostly sight, the characterization through the dark thoughts, and the symbol of the wallpaper, her life, suggesting that fear in the rawest form will either terrorize the soul or set it free.

Accepting that one person’s craziness can be another’s reality can be the barrier between acceptances in society. Preconception can come in any form and from anyone: family, friend, co-worker, or stranger. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes of her reality in “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a semi-autobiography. As a feminist, Gilman gives the silent woman of her decade a voice through such works. In detail, “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells of the narrator suffering from post-partum depression and the only cure, giving by her husband, is rest. A variety of elements play a role in this character’s demise: era, gender inequality, ineffective communication, and personal weaknesses.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Silas Weir Mitchell were part of two worlds, one having to live and be treated for a nervous condition and the other having to study the conditions of nerves. Yet, in this particular moment in the late-19th century United States, one can detect a dialogue between doctor and patient in each of their short stories. That is exactly what is detected between Charlotte Perkins Gilman and S. Weir Mitchell. While both The Case of Dedlow and the Yellow Wallpaper use fiction to express themselves more thoroughly about mental health and science, The Case of Dedlow is more concerned with the aspect of scientific case study while the Yellow Wallpaper focuses on indicting science. This paper will compare and contrast the narratives of the aforementioned short stories and discuss the significance of their reception and how their audience understood them.

Charlotte is described as simple, plain, and petite and the daughter of a clergyman just like Jane. Whenever, Charlotte wanted to get away from her daily life, she would absorb herself