Yellow Wallpaper Insanity

Adversity is something we will all face. It’ll affect everyone ranging, from myself to characters in a book. Even though going through something so challenging, so painful, and so life changing can be hard, how you chose to handle it affects whether or not you overcome it. Adversity can either break a person or make them stronger; it’s up to their will to fight.

A Critical Analysis of Formal Elements in the Short Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The Tell -Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, was released in 1843. It is one of Poe’s shortest stories and provides a look into paranoia and mental deterioration. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was released in 1899. This story also provides a look into mental deterioration and had been misinterpreted when it was first published. The Poe and Gilman stories discussed in this essay will help readers comprehend the credibility of the narrators and the different symbolisms used to create informative yet suspenseful content.

“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

Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.

The Yellow Paper is a symbolic story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is a disheartening tale of a woman struggling to free herself from postpartum depression. This story gives an account of an emotionally and intellectual deteriorated woman who is a wife and a mother who is struggling to break free from her metal prison and find peace. The post-partum depression forced her to look for a neurologist doctor who gives a rest cure. She was supposed to have a strict bed rest. The woman lived in a male dominated society and wanted indictment from it as she had been driven crazy by as a result of the Victorian “rest-cure.” Her husband made sure that she had a strict bed rest by separating her from her child by taking her to recuperate in

In the early nineteenth century, mental illness was a mysterious and confusing disease to the general public. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter" are both short stories that include deranged women. Mary Maloney, the main character of "Lamb to the Slaughter," and Jane, the main character of "The Yellow Wallpaper," both experience a type of mental illness. The two characters' mental illnesses seem to be influenced by the actions and words of their husbands. Mary seems to be relatively normal at first, but after her husband, Patrick, tells her some seemingly upsetting news, Mary is overtaken by her insanity. Jane, on the other hand, has already been diagnosed with her illness at the beginning of the story, and it continues to worsen due to her husband, John's, orders. Mary and Jane's conditions of insanity occur as a result of the environment in which they live and because of the breaking points they reach at the hands of their husbands.

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

"There comes John, and I must put this away -- he hates to have me write a

Throughout both stories there are many common threads. Both stories are dealing with apparent madness. In both we find it difficult to discern actual events from those that occur only in the imaginations of the narrators. Right through both stories the narrators are trying to convince the reader they are sane. “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Yellow Wall Paper” both have a common theme of sublimation and repression. The sublimation is critical in each story, and could be argued to be the core of the story. In both stories the narrators are obsessed with something. In “Tell Tale Heart” the narrator is completely obsessed with the old man’s “evil” eye, and in “The Yellow Wall Paper” the narrator is

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890 and eventually published in 1892 in the New England Magazine and in William Dean Howells' collection, Great Modern American Stories (Shumaker 94). The story was original not only because of its subject matter, but also because it is written in the form of a loosely connected journal. It follows the narrator's private thoughts which become increasingly more confusing. The structure consists of disjointed sentences as the narrator gradually descends more and more into her madness as her only escape from an oppressive husband and society.

“He told me all his opinions, so I had the same ones too; or if they were different I hid them, since he wouldn’t have cared for that” (Ibsen 109). As this quote suggests Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Henrik Ibsen, in A Doll House dramatize that, for woman, silent passivity and submissiveness can lead to madness.

“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.

Conflict is a normal part of everyday life and is an issue that every one faces. It is defined as a state of struggle or fight caused by the actual or perceived opposition or threat of needs, values, interest, status and power. Conflict is also a very important, common and necessary element in stories. It allows the author to add excitement and suspense thus making the story entertaining for readers. In stories, conflict is classified as any difficulty or problem that involves the characters and usually takes place in the formats of a character opposing them self, a character opposing another and a character opposing an object. The “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman perfectly depicts conflicts and exemplifies the various types

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the story of a woman spiralling into madness whilst her physician husband refuses to acknowledge that she has a "real" problem. On the other hand The Black Cat by Edgar Alan Poe is about a man who is initially fond of cats however as the plot progresses he becomes an alcoholic making him moody and violent, which lead him to torture and kills the animals and eventually also his wife. In Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat," symbolism is used to show the narrator’s capacity for violence, madness, and guilt .The recurring theme present in both these stories is that the main protagonists claim that they suffer or have been taken over by a form of madness. In this essay I shall examine the