Sarah Kreeger EngWr 301 Professor Bradford 21 July 2013 Short Story Analysis The Yellow Wallpaper: The Power of Society’s Views On the Care of Mental Patients “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes the form of journal entries of a woman undergoing treatment for postpartum depression. Her form of treatment is the “resting cure,” in which a person is isolated and put on bed rest. Her only social interaction is with her sister-in-law Jennie and her husband, John, who is also her doctor. Besides small interactions with them, most of the time she is left alone. Society believes all she needs is a break from the stresses of everyday life, while she believes that “society and stimulus” (pg 347, paragraph 16) will make …show more content…
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. If she was free to express her feelings, she wouldn’t have had to shove them aside and try to find other things to occupy her mind with. She finds greatest comfort when she writes, but her husband believes that it is bad for her to do so because it is too stimulating. She makes comments many times expressing how writing makes her feel better, that it would “relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (349) and that she “must say
With good intentions, John controls his wife's life and makes all decisions for her, whether she agrees with them or not. His wife is full aware of the restrictions that her husband has imposed on her, but she is recessive to his control and often agrees with him. However, she fails to see “signs of her confinement: the bars at the window, the gate at the top of the stairs, steel rings on the walls, and the nailed-down bestead” (Korb). Because she is unable to escape from the isolation that her husband has kept her in, the woman seeks relief from the yellow wallpaper and she creates an imaginary relationship it. In fact, the worst thing her husband should not of done is give his unstable wife an object that is not appealing to focus on. In doing so, he has given her an opportunity to let her mind wonder and create objects that no one else sees. John, however, does not give any thought to this because after all, he thinks he knows what is best for his wife.
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
This confinement of her imaginative prowess makes the narrator more helpless and isolated. The only thing that narrator really wants to do is ‘writing’. She perceives that pen down her thoughts and ideas would give her a sense of ‘self-actualization’ and ‘self-expression’ and even could help her cure herself. She says in this respect:
A Critical Analysis of Formal Elements in the Short Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
To answer a rhetorical question, the narrator writes the entire story in secrecy, and reveals all true feelings, whether good or bad. “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus -- but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.”. This isolation is reflected in both the narrator’s writing, and her life. John does not often allow her to be visited, even by family. He treats the idea of company like a reward, something that would be received when her health is superior, “When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit ; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.”. With no timeframe in mind, the narrator lives in a constant state of wonder, with no outcome visible. John believes that her illness is frivolous, if even existent. It is incredibly plausible that John is embarrassed by his wife’s mental state, and aims to save himself from the exposure due to it. His skittish actions line up with the idea, and
The Yellow Wallpaper story is based on true story of the writer’s own experience with depression. In the story tells us about the wed suffering from post natal depression. She just moved to the new apartment and decide to live in for around 3 weeks. Her husband is a physician. He wants her to follow his rest treatment. Where he will send her to a isolated room with no any interaction. While in the treatment she named this is nursery with unpleasant wallpaper. She tries to describe hating the way it looks, smells, and how she see a woman behind the wallpaper trying to get out. Ironically, That woman is herself.
The chief source of the narrator 's mental state is her dictatorial husband who suppresses her emotional and creative inclinations and compels her to focus on the objects that surround her. This apathy shoves her deeper into insanity. John confines her in a room that has no getaway with bars on the windows and fixed bed, which is “nailed down.” Her developing insanity is a form of rebellion and a way to gain her own independence from marriage as well. Her fight to set the woman in the wallpaper free denotes her battle for freedom. This paragraph is extremely important to the story, portraying not only how the woman feels about herself, but also what her husband 's therapy is doing to her. Her description of the paper being "dull enough to confuse the eye" and "constantly irritating and provoking study" is alluding to her sense of inferiority and burden. The "lame uncertain curves" she speaks of are likely to reference the ridiculous suggestions that he husband makes for her, and "suicide" being the fate that is destined to result if followed. The "unheard of contradictions" express the faultiness of John 's methods. She describes him at one point: "He says no one but myself can
The yellow wallpaper is a classic short story written by Charlotte Gilman, the story based on Gilman’s experience with depression. After given birth to her child, Gilman suffers from depression which was misdiagnosed as hysteria and nervous illnesses. In “ The Yellow Wall-Paper “ the protagonist which is the narrator yellow wallpaper is a classic short story written by Charlotte Gilman, the story based on Gilman’s experience with depression. After given birth to her child, Gilman suffers from depression which was misdiagnosed as hysteria and nervous illnesses. In “ The Yellow Wall-Paper “ the protagonist which is the narrator at the same time suffer from depression after the birth of her baby.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the crippling story of a lady experiencing post birth anxiety. Set amid the late 1890s, the story demonstrates the mental and passionate consequences of the ordinary "rest cure" endorsed amid that period and the storyteller 's response to this course of treatment. No doubt Gilman was expounding on her own anguish as she herself experienced such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, only two years after the introduction of her little girl Katherine. The rest cure that the storyteller in "The Yellow Wallpaper" portrays is near what Gilman herself experienced; subsequently, the story can be perused as mirroring the sentiments of ladies like herself who endured
The Yellow Wallpaper in Gilman's story is basically just that: a yellow wallpaper. However, in the Gilman's story, the wallpaper is a narrator, a "living" character with a certain form of agency, and a mirroring surface for the character's inner thoughts which enables it to narrate in the first place.
Feminist studies generally focus on the role that hysterical diagnoses and treatments played in reinforcing the prevailing, male-dominant gender roles through the subversion, manipulation and degrading of female experience through the use of medical treatments and power structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper” is a perfect example of these themes. In writing this story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew upon her own personal experiences with hysteria. The adoption of the sick-role was a product of-and a reaction against gender norms and all of the pressures and tensions that their satisfaction demanded. Gilman’s essay uses autobiographical experiences displayed as doppelganger quality the in the main narrator of the
The Yellow Wallpaper Critical Analysis The short story The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in an attempt to mirror her life experiences and express her opinions on many issues of her time. She does so in a way that is both intriguing and thought provoking to the reader. The main character of the story who stays unnamed, likely because she is based off of herself, has deep psychological issues which the root of is unknown and meant to be interpreted from the information in the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her struggles and experiences in her own life to channel the main character and create the emotional whirlwind of a story that she did.
When people hear the words “love” and “hate,” they instantly think of them as two completely distinct subjects. Love is usually perceived as a positive concept while hate is instantly recognized as negative. Similar to love, hate is a strong emotional state that robustly affects one’s mental and even physical circumstance. According to a study that has discovered the biological basis for the two most intense emotions it shows they are intimately linked within the human brain. Love and hate appear to be polar opposites, but scientific studies show that physical nature has found that some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for hate are the same as those that are used during the feeling of love. These feelings are the most grounded
Author’s Background-Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a writer and activist during the late 1800s’ and early 1900’s.She had a very hard childhood. He father left and left her mom to raise two children on her own. When she was 24, she married Charles Stetson in 1884. Along her marriage the couple had one daughter named Katherine. During her marriage she was known to have suffered from depression and when threw some various treatments. Thus believed to have been the reason why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman married a second time with cousin and stayed married until he died in 1934. Later she was detected with breast cancer and committed suicide on August 17, 1935.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is told from the perspective of an obedient wife, who is denied adequate treatment of her serious mental illness. An issue that Gilman knew from her own nervous breakdown and ineffective treatment she was given. This story is considered her greatest piece of fiction because of its horrifying depictions and its bleak outlook (Great American Stories 81). After it was first published in 1892, many interpreted the story only as a horror tale, but year’s later critics have attached many themes and symbolism to the short story. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Gilman uses a descriptive first person point of view to not only immerse readers into the deranged mind of her horrified character, but to also