Theatre Critique Of Friday Night Cafe 's The Yellow Wallpaper

What others see about our life is not always truth. Looking from the outside things can seem so put together, as you dive in a little deeper you find things are not aways as they appear. Especially when it comes to the power of the mind. We are all hiding something within the walls of our own lives and minds. 1“The depression malady of the protagonist-narrator deepens as the story progresses and she appears to be totally crazy in the end; but the interior monologue and the sense of relief and freedom experienced by her suggest the triumph of the questing individual. The obstructing man he’s vanquished on the floor and she walks over him, as it were!” The woman in the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is seen as a wife to a successful man, a

Placed in a room of yellow wallpaper the protagonist, Jane, fights the battle of nonfiction versus fiction; Symbolic Order versus Imaginary Order. John, representing social order by only following practical ideas, is in an uneasy relationship with Jane which shows the weak bond between her and reality. Given her isolation, the words that she writes at first constitutes her thoughts, then as her mental state diminishes, her subconscious starts to make up her journal, giving importance to Suess’ ideas that language is the key symbol of women’s inner experience of postpartum depression. Psychotic symptoms of paranoia and hallucinations appear to have formed, and were controlled, before the

This is a must watch Broadway show that makes your fine, terrible, or even boring day, an absolute blast. The Play That Goes Wrong has finally made its way to America and right at the heart of New York City near Times Square at the Lyceum Theatre. Therefore, the experience is a win-win situation for the audience. The Lyceum Theatre’s architecture is astonishing as it is filled with ornaments, I also realized the letter ‘L’ around the theater, but the most interesting fact is that it is a landmark. It has a proscenium stage while the audience is in the orchestra, balcony, or the mezzanine seats, like where I sat, and there is barely any space if you are a tall person. My seat was near the far end of mezzanine, I couldn’t see a part of the left side of the stage, so I found myself bending sideways to see what was going on, but I saw nothing. I found the side stage lights and a side balcony blocking my view and yet I had a great time.

“I cry at nothing and cry most of the time,” says Jane, in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (21). This story gives the reader a glimpse into mental illness and the human psyche by telling the story of Jane. The main character, Jane, is an unstable woman that was put in a bad situation. She is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression which causes slight hysterical tendencies by her physician husband (Gilman, 2). Along with this, Jane exhibited many other symptoms predominant in other mental illnesses, such as postpartum depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. He believes the best course of treatment for his wife is to move her into a isolated, colonial house away from people, or “stimuli.” This, however, only worsens Jane’s mental condition and further drives her into insanity. The fragility of Jane’s mind was driven to a breaking point by different mental illnesses and conditions she was put into. Although the yellow wallpaper was the major concern Jane had that she viewed as why she was not recovering from her mental illness, many factors added to the bad situation she was in which led to her eventual psychotic break. Three major factors that further deteriorated her mental health are postpartum depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and being treated like a child by her husband. This paper will research these three things that led to Jane’s mental breakdown and the symbolism of each.

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a first-person narration of madness experienced by an unnamed woman in the Victorian era. The madness is exposed through a “nervous condition” diagnosed by the writer’s husband, a physician, who believes the only cure is prohibiting all intellectual thought and to remain in solitude for a “rest-cure”. The act of confinement propels the narrator into an internal spiral of defiance against patriarchal discourse. Through characterization and symbolism, “The Yellow Wallpaper” exhibits an inventive parallel between the narrator’s mental deterioration and her internal struggle to break free from female oppression imposed on her through her husband and society.

Her loving husband, John, never takes her illness seriously. The reader has a front row seat of the narrator’s insanity voluminously growing. He has shown great patience with the recovery of his wife’s condition. However, the narrator is clear to the reader that she cannot be her true self with him. In the narrator’s eyes she feels he is completely oblivious to how she feels and could never understand her. If she did tell him that the yellow wallpaper vexed her as it does he would insist that she leave. She could not have this.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” has a narrator who is clinically insane at the end of our story, but who wouldn’t be? In this tale of madness, we see a young woman go insane from not only the lack of creative stimulus in a creative mind, but also from the oppression of the

She has been confined to the former nursery in her family's colonial mansion to cure her of hysterical tendencies, a medical condition she was diagnosed with after the birth of her son (Gilman 1997: 1f.). The woman confides in her secret journal how her contact with the outside world has become strictly limited on account of her Doctor's recommendations, and how the treatment forces her to spend her days in a barely furnished room with only her own mind and the objects around her as companions (Gilman 1997: 1f.). One of the main objects she actively engages with during this period of isolation, other than the nailed down bed and her secret journal, is the old yellow wallpaper covering the walls around her (Gilman 1997: 1f.). While the woman's condition worsens gradually over the course of the entries she makes in her secret journal, her growing isolation and inactivity make her start to see movement in the patterns and holes of the old wallpaper (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). The character becomes absorbed by what she thinks she sees, and begins to directly interact with the things she sees in the paper, until she rips the paper to shreds, and violently frees what she sees, and subsequently, also herself from captivity (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997:

The scenes and props complimented the attire of the performers, blending together create a magnificent display. The scenery was realistic enough to afford the viewer an escape into depths of the show. The setting was beautiful and the structures almost lifelike, excepting the absence of a front screen door. It seems that almost all plays and television shows I have viewed neglect this detail. The stage lighting played a key role in the show by setting the mood of the performance during soulful, pensive songs. In contrast, the lighting proved to be a detriment by overbearing the performance of the artists, in that one’s attention was drawn to the glare of extreme quantities of makeup rather than the actions of the characters. This was most notable during the final portions of the production.

In a classic piece of feminist writing, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the mental deterioration of a woman diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed the rest cure, an infamously ineffective treatment for anxiety and depression pioneered by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell at the turn of the nineteenth century. The story is framed as the narrator’s journal entries, which are infrequent and rushed because writing them violates the rest cure, thus making her writings a better representative of her descent into madness as well as her potent emotions regarding her confinement than had she written one for every day of her three month stay in the room with the repellant and titular yellow wallpaper. Gilman expresses the narrator’s societally mandated respect for her husband in addition to her resentment of the inferior treatment of women through her formal and impassioned tone and virulent imagery in reference to the setting in her 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox: as she loses touch with the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner reality of her life. This inner/outer split is crucial to understanding the nature of the narrator’s suffering. At every point, she is faced with relationships, objects, and situations that seem innocent and natural but that are actually quite bizarre and even oppressive. In a sense, the plot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the narrator’s attempt to avoid acknowledging the extent to which her external situation stifles her inner impulses. From the beginning, we see that the narrator is an imaginative, highly expressive woman. She remembers terrifying herself with imaginary nighttime monsters as a child, and she enjoys the notion that the house they have taken is haunted. Yet as part of her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions rebel at this treatment, and she turns her imagination onto seemingly neutral objects—the house and the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration. Her negative feelings color her description of her surroundings, making them seem uncanny and sinister, and she

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provides an insight into the life of the narrator- a woman suppressed and unable to express herself because of her controlling husband- leading the reader down her fall to insanity, allowing for her inner conflict to be clearly expressed. The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story develops.

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

The combination of the protagonist’s insanity and the setting of the nursery with yellow wallpaper identify a theme of imprisonment of females in a domestic world. The anonymous wife is taken by her husband to a country mansion to recover from a state of hysteria. The narrator then takes it upon herself to actively study and decode the wallpaper, and through her downward spiral into insanity she untangles its confused pattern to reveal a woman trapped in the depths of the chaotic outlines. As time passes the narrator begins to relate to this encaged woman and believes that she too is trapped within the wallpaper. During the last few nights the narrator tears down the wallpaper in an attempt to escape from her cage. The use of the yellow wallpaper as a symbolic gesture to the entrapment of women shows how setting can directly relate to the theme of a short story.