Women Are Crazy By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1899, is a semi-autobiographical short story depicting a young woman’s struggle with depression that is virtually untreated and her subsequent descent into madness. Although the story is centered on the protagonist’s obsessive description of the yellow wallpaper and her neurosis, the story serves a higher purpose as a testament to the feminist struggle and their efforts to break out of their domestic prison. With reference to the works of Janice Haney-Peritz’s, “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s

  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality.  This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte P. Gilman examines women’s denied freedom of expression. The story reveals the role of women in the late nineteenth century society and how the gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their minds to flourish. The narrator has no say in even the finest details of her life, therefore she retreats into her obsessive fantasy. The symbols in this story illustrate that living a domestic life has devastating effects on the mental health of women.

The story "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about control. In the late 1800's, women were looked upon as having no effect on society other than bearing children and keeping house. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world dominated by males. The men held the jobs, the men held the knowledge, the men held the key to the lock known as society . . . or so they thought. The narrator in "The Wallpaper" is under this kind of control from her husband, John. Although most readers believe this story is about a woman who goes insane, it is actually about a woman’s quest for control of her life.

Shumaker, Conrad. “"too Terribly Good to Be Printed": Charlotte Gilman's "the Yellow Wallpaper"”. American Literature 57.4 (1985): 588–599. Web. This article is about the feminism in the twentieth century, dominant tradition, and the narrator’s vivid imagination. This article explains the woman’s role instead of the tale of horror or the madness of mental breakdown and the complex work of art as well as an effective indictment of the twentieth century view. This article describes the room to be confine violent mental cases almost like being in a cage. This article discusses Gilman’s deception of the narrator’s decline into madness which it captures the symptoms of a mental breakdown. I can use this article because it is accurate and creditable for my research paper.

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.

The descent into madness by the main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the impact of postpartum depression coupled with the oppression of women during the time period in which it was written.  The author, Charlotte Gilman, suffered from postpartum depression herself and is considered the model for the main character and what she goes through, as chronicled in an article she later wrote in 1913 entitled “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.”  The woman in the story is taken for a “nervous condition” to have a rest cure prescribed by her husband, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, where the woman is essentially locked up against her will in a bedroom with limited human contact or means to occupy her time.  The pattern of the yellow wallpaper in the room serves as prison bars as she continues to go mad. The main character is treated as a piece of property, prescribed a treatment for what is clearly postpartum depression that only furthers her condition rather than cures it, causing her to become beyond help, which directly portrays the subservient role of women in society at that time.

Often, it said that a man is the first to notice a woman’s madness. However, in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman proves her insanity through her husband’s denial of her condition. Although known for her dark personal revelations, there is also a lot of controversy, inspiring young readers to criticize—as well as commend—her writings. While Gilman’s memoir describes her crucial path of depression and repression, the author is ignorant to that fact that she is essentially describing a prevalent allegory for men living upper class using dialogue and symbolism, which ultimately creates a new identity for women in the late 1800’s. Set in the 1890’s, society lived in a patriarchy where men were commonly stereotyped as superior to women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” seems to be about a woman suffering from postpartum depression at first glance, but as the reader looks deeper into the text, can notice that this only scratches the surface. The protagonist, confined to a small room with yellow wallpaper under her husband’s direction, starts to go a bit mad. Her projection of her shadow grows into an imaginary woman that embodies the conflicts she experiences throughout the story, leading her to become more and more unstable and break down the boundaries of her and her shadow’s identity.

Being a woman with a mental illness in the early and mid-1900s is not easy. They are frequently treated as inferior, told to sleep as much as possible, and told to avoid human interaction or creativity of any kind. This sexist, common practice is prevalent throughout the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Early in the story, the reader learns that the narrator has a mental illness and is confined to the nursery of their summer home by her controlling husband. This confinement leads to the narrator’s obsession with the yellow wallpaper that lines the walls of the room.

The fight for Sanity in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The theme of a woman’s role in “The Yellow Wallpaper” has been raised by authors not once in the context of freedom and limitations. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores the way a woman can suffer when her potential and natural power is repressed by social conventions and the institution of marriage. By means of setting, symbolism, irony and character development the author exposes her message about how female nature is destroyed by the cruel machine that wants to subdue her.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a unnamed woman discovering her true self. It exists under the narrative structure of an first person account of a woman slipping into madness, by slowly becoming fixated on the yellow wallpaper around her, and seeing terrifying visions in the wallpaper. It is clear what the yellow wallpaper symbolizes, it is an example of society confining her and forcing her into a role. Initially interpreted as a horror story, this paper examines the The Yellow Wallpaper as actually a feminist text about a woman who is discovering she has no control over her life, and is trying to create an environment where she can escape her social roles, and finally gain autonomy over her decisions - even if she is transformed or slips into madness.. Either way the metaphor is clear, the narrator’s transformation or possession, is actually a new found self-awareness of her marriage, children, and role in society and how the unnamed protagonist tries to escape by transforming.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” relates the tale of a woman slowly driven to insanity because of the wallpaper being “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman). This narrative has supported many academic discussions about patriarchy, mental illness, and gender roles in the 19th century. The most common literary criticism about the piece is through a feminist lense, and for good reason, as this piece scales through many female-centric issues. Through this logic, many have been led to believe that the wallpaper itself is a critique against the patriarchy and how it oppressed the narrator. This explanation is sensible historically and narratively, however, I propose that

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.

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.