Theme Of Isolation In The Yellow Wallpaper

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she

The narrator has a natural creativity that when left idol drives he insane. She is forced to hide he anxieties and fears which ultimately drives her to insanity. Even though she keeps a journal writing is in particularly off limits. Creativity was forbidden to her, John constantly reminds her to keep it contained. She even writes: “He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” She longs for an outlet for her repressed mind, going as far as to keep the journal, the one the audience is now privy to. She often refers to the journal as her only source of solace. As her sanity deteriorates, her mind starts to imagine things. The wallpaper becomes her outlet for this creativity. She begins describing the mansion as haunted and starts seeing a woman in the walls. She describes this saying: “The dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder-I be­gin to think - I wish John would take we away from here!” Her natural eventually becomes so repressed it drives her

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, dank room covered in musty wallpaper all play important parts in driving the wife insane. The husband's smothering attention, combined with the isolated environment, incites the nervous nature of the wife, causing her to plunge into insanity to the point she sees herself in the wallpaper. The author's masterful use of not only the setting (of both time and place), but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to participate in the woman's growing insanity.

The vivid descriptions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” help to bring the reader along in the narrators decent into a kind of psychosis. It starts mildly, with her describing the color of wallpaper as “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 528). As more time passes she begins to see more things in the paper such as “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes start at you,” and for it have “so much expression in an inanimate thing” (Gilman 592). As the pattern and descriptions get more twisted, we get visual clues of the madness that is slowly consuming the narrator. The color of the paper even begins to become a physical thing she can smell descried as, “creep[ing] all over the house...sulking...hiding...lying in wait for me…It gets into my hair” (Gilman 534). In the end we get a graphic visual representation of her full psychosis

The "Yellow Wall Paper "by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression. The setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the driving force in the story because it is the main factor that caused the narrator to go insane.

In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband has rented an old mansion in the country for the summer. John is relying on this getaway as time for his wife’s nervous condition to resolve itself with rest and medicines. As the story unfolds for the readers, it becomes apparent her husband, John, is dominating, and controlling. She feels somewhat doomed that she is unable to change her circumstances and she ends up as a victim, thus confirming the dominance of men over women during that period. Between the narrator’s controlling husband and the deterioration of her mind, she snaps and becomes completely delusional.

Due to their behavior, both men lead their wives to rebel. John’s controlling behavior causes the narrator to abandon him by going completely mad. First, she questions John’s pronouncements. The narrator believes that congenial work, with excitement and change would do her good (p.297). Next, she focuses on the wallpaper. She describes its negative features noting that patches are gone as if school boys wore it out (p.298). Upset by her husband’s actions, the narrator decides to begin writing in secret. . It reaches the point where the narrator has to hide her writings from him, because he gets upset if she even writes a word (p.298). -After time passes, we see her obsession grow. John seems to be oblivious to the narrator’s conditions, telling her “you know the place is doing you good” (p.299). She notices that the pattern is torturing (p.303). Finally, she begins to see a woman hiding behind the pattern (p.304). Looking for the woman in the pattern gives her something to look forward to (p.305). Ultimately she comes to believe that she is the woman in the wallpaper and wants to free herself. She begins peeling off the paper through the night, and by morning removes all the paper she could while standing (p.307). The narrator even begins to contemplate jumping out of the window, but does not

The structure of the plot is formed when she ignores her husband’s orders and begins to write in a diary. She believes writing will help her heal. The story’s setting takes place in a room. She starts talking about the room she is in. How there are “rings and things in the walls.” John eventually catches her writing in her journal and tells her to stop. When he leaves, the narrator continues to write about the yellow wallpaper and soon becomes overly attached to it. She began to notice a pattern behind it. It looked like a woman “stooping down”.

In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, both women are suffering from emotional situations. This pain is coming from the controlling male influences in there lives. The protagonist in “A rose for Emily” is a young, slender girl who is tormented by her father’s influence in her life. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane, is a wife who is suffering from post partum and loneliness. Both of these women suffer from similar emotional depression, but differ in the way they go about becoming free.

As the protagonist suffers from her “nervous condition”, the isolated environment causes her to only get worse. Being trapped in the bedroom with yellow wallpaper contributes her emotional distress to become overpowering. The inability to verbally express her feelings of loneliness causes her to write in a more creative way about her relationships with objects in the room, specifically the yellow wallpaper. She begins to write about the yellow wallpaper as if it is suppose to have some sort of significance, in which it does. In the beginning of the narrator’s isolation, her attention is focused on the details of the yellow wallpaper’s pattern that are “dull enough to confused the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study” (438). The wallpaper’s characteristics become hard to

The brain does not always need isolation sometimes it just needs a human touch. This thought is proven in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story a lady suffering from postpartum depression moves to a creepy old house with her so called husband John. She is isolated in a room with a weird yellow wallpaper. This room eventually causes her to go insane and crawl around the room. The narrator then begins to imagine people behind the wallpaper. On the last day at the house the narrator rips down all of the wallpaper that she can reach. While she is doing this her husband John comes home and is knocking on the bedroom door. She has the door locked and continues to creep around the room. Eventually John finds the key to the

Charlotte Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” creating a nameless narrator who follows her husband’s orders by attempting to avoid acknowledging the extent of her inner issues. The narrator is placed in a house that is motioned as "haunted" in hopes of curing her depression. Her husband keeps her in one specific room, forbidding her from using her imagination in any way in order to insure she is caused no stress. Even writing is denied, the one thing this woman wants to do. She wants to write and create which may have helped her overcome her mental illness, but is rejected in fear of causing her too much stress.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is written as if it were a secret diary, and is told from the perspective of a woman who suffers from nervous depression. The woman is living in a large summer home with John, her husband and physician, that she describes as “a haunted house.” Although the woman thinks the house is grand, she has a hatred for the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. Not wanting to feed into her illness, John refuses to let the woman have a different room or change the wallpaper, because he thinks it is good for her.

She says, “I never saw a worse paper in my life”. Her feelings toward the yellow wallpaper in the beginning of the story are full of hatred for it because she goes on to describe how awful it is to her. She reveals her new feelings for the paper in the end of the story when she finds Jennie, her housekeeper, examining it and says, “…she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!”. She seems to be suspicious of other people looking at the wallpaper because she fears they may be looking at the pattern and trying to discover its meaning before she gets a chance to. The examples show evidence that the narrator had a relationship with the wallpaper throughout the story which portrays that this woman was so bored she became obsessed with the one thing that gave her entertainment which could prove oppression is the overall situation in which she suffers because she is under her husband’s authority so much that she drives herself into having a relationship with

John’s prescription for the narrator is complete rest; she is not to participate in any physical or cognitive activity, including her favorite pastime, writing. John claims that his wife is not sick and that resting her mind is the correct treatment, but the narrator knows that she needs to express herself through creativity and writing. The narrator rebels against her husband’s demands by sneaking a diary to discuss her experiences and emotions while being isolated in the room. The whole story is made up of the woman’s diary entries, and unlike her husband, readers are able to discover the narrator’s true thoughts and desires. She states “There comes John, and I must put this away,---he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 381). John attempts to force his wife to give up her way of life as a writer and her voice, but the narrator does not let him. Even if she must sneak to write, the woman insists that writing is her best therapy and will allow her to heal. The narrator uses her own voice by concluding that “John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way---it is such a relief” (Gilman 385). She makes her own decisions and does what she pleases, despite her husband’s commands. Likewise, Victorian women began to stand up for themselves and refuse to be defined by the commands and views of men. The