“Paper Pills” is a short story written by Sherwood Anderson in his most recognized book, Winesburg, Ohio, which has several interrelated stories (Belasco 859). The story is about an older physician, named Dr. Reefy, who is distanced from society, and only expresses his thoughts on pieces of paper, which he stuffs into his pockets (Bort). Eventually, he meets a younger woman who he marries and shares those crumbled pieces of paper with for a brief period before her death. The story is recounted by an unknown narrator, which is the same narrator throughout the book—using several instances of imagery and symbolism to describe Dr. Reefy’s hands, truths, and his courtship and relationship with the younger woman.
The description of Dr. Reefy’s hands is a prominent image used throughout “Paper Pills”. His hands are described as enormous with “extraordinarily large” knuckles and when closed resemble “clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods” (Anderson 867). This description implies that his hands are rough in appearance and adds to his mien as an older-meek man. Later in the story, the narrator compares Doctor Reefy’s hands to “gnarled apples,” which image also symbolizes his courtship with the younger woman (Anderson 867). According to Epifanio San Juan Jr., these images of Doctor Reefy’s hands fuse together different “figurative patterns” in the story. San Juan states, “The story of his courtship is…compared to ‘twisted little apples’ which in turn evoke the image of his gnarled knuckles, and therefore the hands that write down his thoughts.”
“Paper Pills” is connected to the first story of Anderson’s book, Winesburg, Ohio, when the narrator describes Doctor Reefy working “ceaselessly” ...
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Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2.
Boston: Bedford, 2008. 857-60. Print.
Bort, Barry D. "Winesburg, Ohio: The Escape from Isolation." The Midwest Quarterly 11.4
(Summer 1970): 443-456. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis
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San Juan, Epifanio, Jr. "Vision and Reality: A Reconsideration of Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio." American Literature 35.2 (May 1963): 137-155. Rpt. in Short Story
Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 91. Detroit: Gale, 2006.
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Phillips, William L. "THE ECLETIC DR. REEFY." American Notes & Queries 15.1 (1976): 2.
Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 8 Apr. 2011.
Updike, John. “A&P”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 864 - 869.
Though confined to similar situations, Kleist's Marquise and Gilman's narrator are delineated in very different manners. While the Marquise displays boldness and determination in locating her assailant, the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper allows the intriguing wallpaper to take control of her senses. Both stories exhibit the consequence of a mythical diagnosis administered to an initially sane and healthy person.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wall-Paper," does more than just tell the story of a woman who suffers at the hands of 19th century quack medicine. Gilman created a protagonist with real emotions and a real psych that can be examined and analyzed in the context of modern psychology. In fact, to understand the psychology of the unnamed protagonist is to be well on the way to understanding the story itself. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in first-person narrative, charts the psychological state of the protagonist as she slowly deteriorates into schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality).
“The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates the issue of John’s control; over his wife as both husband and doctor by the inability to separate the doctor role from a husband role. In the beginning of the story the narrator says she “believes with congenial work, with excitement and change would do me good” (419). Gillman illustrates John as a person who does not realize his wife‘s health was based on the need to occupy her with something that is work relative and not forbid her to work .John shows that he does not care about her feelings as the role of husband role should be but rather takes his wife as his patient who is not physically we’’ to do work around the house. The narrator tells John that she wants the room repapered which at first he says yes, but later he says no because it would be worse for her as a “nervous patient” (421).John first demonstrates his husband role as a husband who is willing to please his wife but then plays back the role of her doctor by not letting her repaper the wall because it worsens her health. This shows that the i...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about an anonymous female narrator and her husband John who is a physician who has rented a colonial manner in the summer. Living in that house, the narrator felt odd living there. Her husband, john who is a physician and also a doctor to his wife felt that the narrator is under nervous depression. He further mentions that when a person is under depression, every feeling is an odd feeling. Therefore, the narrator was not given permission by John to work but just to take medication and get well fast. This made the narrator to become so fixated with the yellow wallpaper in the former nursery in which she located. She was depressed for a long time and became even more depressed. This ha...
"The Yellow Wallpaper" features an unnamed female narrator who serves to exemplify the expectations placed upon women of the time period. As we are told early on, she is suffering from a "nervous condition" (Gilman 1). While we are not told the specific nature of this condition, we do discover that the cure prescribed by John, the narrator's husband and doctor, entails taking "phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise" while intellectual "work" is "absolutely forbidden Ö until [she is] well again" (Gilman 1). This poses a particular problem for the narrator, due to her desire to write, which she continues to do "in spite of them," and causes her to hide her writing to avoid facing "heavy opposition" (Gilman 1). The treatment to which t...
The narrator, referred to as Jane, has been suffering from what her husband, who is a physician, believes is a “temporary nervous depression.” He prescribes a “rest cure”
The hospital release forms illustrate the white man’s way of making the narrator less than human by depriving him of his work at the company; the doctor will not let him work:
Sutton, William A. The Road to Winesburg: A mosaic of the imaginative life of Sherwood Anderson. NJ. The Scarecrow Press, 1972.
Brockmeier, Kevin. “A Fable With Slips of White Paper Spilling From The Pockets.” The View From The Seventh Layer. New York. Pantheon. 2008. 260-267. Print.
The story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ is one of intrigue and wonder. The story was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it happens to be the story under analytical scrutiny, hence the title as well as the first sentence. The characters in the story consist of the narrator, Jennie, the wet nurse, the narrator's husband John, and the women in the wallpaper. In the story, the narrator and her husband, as well as her newly born daughter and the nanny for the daughter, take a summer trip to a house away from the city. The husband and brother of the narrator are physicians, and neither believe that she is sick, they say “there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency...”
In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman shows the true nature of a relationship in the 1800’s and how each genders role played in both the relationship and in society. As the story begins, both the narrator’s husband and brother, regard her as nervously depressed and hysterical. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression what is one to do?” (Gilman, 35). The narrator’s feelings or actual understanding of what’s going on with herself, do...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in the first person narrative of a women's secret journal and her descent into madness. With the medical community of the nineteenth century misunderstanding and mistreating women, despite the protests of women. The treatment that John, the narrator’s husband, offers does not help at all, in fact throughout the story the narrator’s journal entrees and condition progressively worsens. Spending the summer in an abandoned mansion in order to recover from what her physician husband believes is a “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” (648). Her husband does not believe that her illness is serious the narrator states,“You see he does not believe I am sick” (647)! According to history men thought that they knew better than women, especially women who were “hysterical.” ...
The creation of a stressful psychological state of mind is prevalent in the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Ophelia’s struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and the self-inflicted sickness seen in William Blake’s “Mad Song”. All the characters, in these stories and poems, are subjected to external forces that plant the seed of irrationality into their minds; thus, creating an adverse intellectual reaction, that from an outsider’s point of view, could be misconstrued as being in an altered state due to the introduction of a drug, prescribed or otherwise, furthering the percep...
Frank, Thomas, H. "The Interpretation of Limits: Doctors and Novelists in the Fiction of Philip Roth". The Journal of Popular Culture,vol 28. 1995.