In the story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman the narrator is looked at as a crazy person that is obsessed with this ugly wallpaper. Her husband and brother thinks that she's crazy so they put her in a large room where she is now living in because of her condition. The husband leaving her in there by herself with no socialization doesn't help better it if anything it just makes it worse. If her husband cared he wouldn't want her by herself or have to hide things from him along with letting her take painkillers every hour.
The narrator listens to everything that her husband tells her. He is a physician along with her brother. If both of them are telling her that she's crazy then she thinks that she might be. John puts his wife in a room to be left by herself with ugly wallpaper and no one to talk to. If her husband was “caring” about her he wouldn't let her be by herself in a room she
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“As soon as it was moonlight and the poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.” (Gilman 812) This goes to show that she thinks there's a lady stuck inside the wallpaper and she needs to help her get out of it.
If john actually knew what was going on with her he would get her off the meds and start interacting with her.
Overall the narrator doesn't have the right mindset, caused by her being loaded on pain killers. The narrator studied the yellow wallpaper so much because she had nothing else to look at or keep her entertained through the time that she was there. That's why she criticized every little thing about it and started seeing this woman inside of the wallpaper and thinking she needed to help her get out of it, when really no women was in there or trapped it was just her mind that caused her to
He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” (Gilman 528) Here we see Johns assumption of being superior to his wife leads him to misjudge her situation. Throughout the story John patronizes his wife all while he believes he is trying to help her by doing so. The narrator acts like a subordinate child, she has no say in what happens to her or in her life.
The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is told she needs to rest constantly to overcome her sickness, so she is forced to stay in the old nursery where there is yellow-orange wallpaper with a busy, obnoxious pattern that she hates. She tries to study the wallpaper to distinguish the pattern, and as time goes on she believes she sees a woman moving around in the background of the pattern. Also, during this period of time the character’s condition is worsening, because her husband is causing her mind to weaken by not allowing her to exert herself at all; he says she is not to think about her condition, walk through the garden or visit family. All she can do is sleep and trace the wallpaper, and being cooped up in the room causes her to begin hallucinating. The narrator sees the woman trying to escape from the wallpaper throughout the night, and she ultimately completely breaks down and believes that she is the woman.
Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.
Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ both serve a highly horrific purpose which is both good examples for the gothic. The strongest example of gothic is ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ as it established the extreme horror intense and shows the gothic scene of the house.
But John would not hear of it” (Gilman 308). – “I wonder – I begin to think – I wish John would take me away from here” (Gilman 314). She said she would hate herself if she had to live in the treatment room long “the paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is tripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life” – “the color is repellant” – “a smoldering unclear yellow, strangely faded by slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly Sulphur tint in others.” – “I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long” (Gilman 309). The treatment doesn’t help reduce her stressful and depression. She feels worse than before. She doesn’t feel like writing before since she moved into the yellow wallpaper – a nursery room. Besides, she is abandoned because her husband away all day. The lonely feeling make her “nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing” (Gilman 309). Preventing from moving and working treatment and focusing on resting and being alone is a wrong treatment method. The narrator gets tired and tired every day and is more nervous because she just feels like “a comparative burden” to her husband. One more time, the husband rejects her feeling – she want get out of the house to feel the fresh air and meet people around which makes she feels relax and happy – “I’m
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the idea of “true womanhood” is challenged. The white woman portrayed in the story is prescribed what is known as the “rest cure” due to the overwhelming pressure of being the perfect woman, wife, and mother. Driven mad by the smothering of her husband and her inability to do anything for herself, the woman in this story goes crazy attempting to free herself from the constraints. In stark contrast to the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Sojourner Truth, a former slave, delivers a speech titled, “Ain’t I a Woman,” in 1851 that shakes people to their very core. A little before “The Yellow Wallpaper” was released, Truth shares a message that is astoundingly different from the
At first, she finds the wallpaper's intricate patterns fascinating, but as her mental state deteriorates, she becomes obsessed with deciphering its hidden meanings and patterns. The oppressive and stifling nature of the wallpaper mirrors the constraints placed upon her by her husband and society. As she becomes increasingly fixated on the wallpaper, it becomes a manifestation of her own internal struggles and conflicts. The gradual unraveling of the wallpaper mirrors the protagonist's descent into madness, culminating in a chilling conclusion where she believes she is the woman trapped behind the pattern. The wallpaper takes on a life of its own in her mind, reflecting her own internal struggles and
The story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman who is very mentally ill on her vacation with her husband. She is suffering from “nervous depression", which effect her greatly on her psyche levels and reality. While she is recovering she starts imaging a woman in the wallpaper looking at her trying to escape. Her mind start to believe that the woman in the wallpaper is real to the point that she consume her very mind. The narrator illustrate that the woman in the yellow wallpaper is a representation of mind failing to the illness she has. The reason why is because she suffers from neglect, depression, and the insanity that warps her mentally.
In this psychological tale we are introduced to a woman facing a mental illness in the late 1800’s writing secretly about essentially being belittled about her health by her husband, John, a doctor, who subjects her to bed rest and isolation to the real world to recover. Her words: “...John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (page 2 of The Yellow Wall-Paper) struck with me. I understand the feeling of suddenly feeling useless, unproductive and sort of trapped in your own mind. As she loses touch with life outside of the house, she begins to obsess with the women she sees behind the yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. First, I believed the wallpaper to be a metaphor of her depression, “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design [of the wallpaper].” (page 4 of The
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper depicts the tale of a woman confined to the old nursery in her family's colonial mansion (Gilman 1997: 1f.). She was diagnosed with " a slight hysterical tendency", a popular diagnosis in women towards the end of the 19th century, and now recounts her experiences during her condition's treatment in the form of journal entries (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). Over time, the treatment's strict limitations and lack of contact with the outside world begin to influence the woman's sanity negatively, continuously accelerating her deterioration until the situation escalates violently at the end of the story (Gilman 1997: 1f., Teichler 1984: 61). The progress of the
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.
She explained this in Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper. After the loss of her child she admits she suffered from a sort of mental breakdown but never had any sort of hallucinations. The actual yellow wallpaper in the story was described to be hideous just as her situation was. This ugly situation “the wallpaper” is what had her trapped and she felt she need to free herself by tarring it down. The nursery room she was staying in resembled her being stuck in a period of morning for the lose of her child. Her doctor at the time and the doctor in the story was of the male gender along with the males being the ones that told her what to do and what was wrong with her and how to feel symbolizes how she felt oppressed by men and how other women in society did as well. This oppressing lead her to seeing the women in the wallpaper. She felt the need to free this woman and capture her because she initially wanted to free herself from the situation as well as find herself and her dignity
The times were hard for women; "John does not know how much I really suffer." (p. 14). John also treats her more like his daughter than his wife; "and calls me a blessed little goose" (p. 15), helps to show how he does this he also read her to sleep as you would an infant. Finally the room which John chooses for him and his wife is the old nursery for the house. The bed is immovable, "it is nailed down (p 19). The windows are barred which gives it a setting of more like a prison or a mad house for the insane.
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
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.