Feminism And Individuality In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Daniyal Ahmed Annmarie Steffes Interpretation of Literature 21 3 April 2014 Title Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses “The Yellow Wallpaper” to express her thoughts on feminism and individuality. Gilman takes the reader through the mind of a woman who we’re not completely sure of how she became crazy. When does the woman become crazy and why? No one will ever surely know exactly what happened. The way that the woman narrates the story tells a lot of information about who the woman truly is and how she feels inferior to her husband John and the other men throughout the story. This inferiority may have caused the woman’s sickness. Some Critiques explain that the middle aged woman in the story is truly crazy, She was diagnosed as being mad crazy and is being treated as a patient in her own home by John, her husband. The woman’s husband is a doctor and proclaims that this is true and that she is actually sick and needs help. Throughout the entire story she is being ceased from doing things that the average person would do on a daily basis, which is suppose to help her. The woman is being stopped from writing, reading and sometimes even thinking. Her husband doesn’t want her working or doing any other physical activities either. All of these treatments are eventually suppose to help her and she will soon become a normal person again. Throughout the narration the woman does not follow what is being prescribed to her by her husband. She still reads and writes letters, therefore her condition worsens. Towards the end of the story she becomes mad crazy about the wallpaper that is in the room that she is trapped in. She starts to see herself in the paper. When she looks at the paper she sees another woman in the artwork of the wallpaper.... ... middle of paper ... ...g. Due to all of the different weird “treatments” that her husband, John, made her do she became crazy. The story starts out with her talking about the illness. “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind--) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own When thought about there could be different ways that it was interpreted, but I think that the woman was actually crazy. There is too much textual evidence to deny that the woman was really crazy. The way that Gilman used the wallpaper, such a minuscule item, shows that the woman was indeed crazy and how her obsession with it has nothing to do with the actually wallpaper itself, just the woman.

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