The Peculiar Room
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator and her husband John, rent out a house for three months. During their stay the narrator explains how she isn’t allowed to work and takes tonics and phosphates to recover from hysteria. The narrator is the main character in the story and goes through several changes throughout the story. The narrator’s mind slowly deteriorates because of her mental condition and the lack of attention she receives from everyone around her. The narrator in the story is the protagonist and her disease is the main antagonist. Although John can be seen as antagonistic, his motives mean well when he treats his wife. Society also plays a role as an antagonist because she is a woman that has a sickness and everyone believes that rest will heal her. Unfortunately, having social contact and interactions with people might have helped cure her. She is a dynamic character and continues to change throughout the story as her mind erodes. This can be seen when she starts examining the wallpaper more in detail and becoming hostile when others look at it.
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The most major conflict in the story is the battle she has with her sickness. The reader knows that the narrator is sick and that John and her brother believe she has a temporary nervous depression. The treatment that John and her brother decide to use involves little interaction with people and an enormous amount of rest. This leads to the second conflict which is the narrator vs. herself. The narrator explains how she used to imagine scary monsters when she was younger and how the house they rented could be haunted. Her imagination foreshadows her connection with the wallpaper and how being isolated led her to going insane. There are also several minor conflicts throughout the story, as the narrator becomes suspicious of John and her sister in law Jennie’s appreciation with the
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator becomes more depressed throughout the story because of the recommendation of isolation that was made to her. In this short story the narrator is detained in a lonesome, drab room in an attempt to free herself of a nervous disorder. The narrator’s husband, a physician, adheres to this belief and forces his wife into a treatment of solitude. Rather than heal the narrator of her psychological disorder, the treatment only contributes to its effects, driving her into a severe depression. Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where in she is locked into an upstairs room.
It is clear that in their marriage, her husband makes her decisions on her behalf and she is expected to simply follow blindly. Their relationship parallels the roles that men and women play in marriage when the story was written. The narrator’s feelings of powerlessness and submissive attitudes toward her husband are revealing of the negative effects of gender roles. John’s decision to treat the narrator with rest cure leads to the narrator experiencing an intense feeling of isolation, and this isolation caused her mental decline. Her descent into madness is at its peak when she grows tears the wallpaper and is convinced that “[she’s] got out at last, in spite of [John] and Jennie… and [they] can’t put her back!”
“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...
They are written during a time period when women were not viewed as important as men. The narrator from the yellow wallpaper is suffering from post-natal depression and has been recommended the rest of her cure by her husband and her brother, both physicians. Instead of curing her, it worsened her condition. The protagonist did try to convince her husband about what she would prefer, but she could not overcome the powerful authority figure. The narrator is restricted from working, writing, which leads to her obsession with the yellow wallpaper and suffocates her into madness.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has fabricated that includes a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator of this story grows obsessed with the wallpaper in her room because her husband minimizes her exposure to the outside world and maximizes her rest.
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...”
The Yellow Wallpaper is a popular book when discussing psychology in the late nineteenth century. The author, Charlotte Gilman, wrote her experience of mental illness through her narrator. Gilman suffered with depression after giving birth and she never fully recovered from it. (Gilman 95). The narrator is depicted as a woman who has been diagnosed with what was called a nervous disorder. Her husband, a psychologist, gave her several different tonics and other substances that are supposed to make her better. She was also put on bed rest meaning that she was not able to work or do anything that would tire her out. She is told to go and rest several times during the story and it is evident that her ‘psychosis’ gets worse when she is forced to stay in her room and rest for the majority of her days and all night. She begins to see women in the pattern of her wallpaper and she becomes obsessed with it. The narrator becomes very protective of her wallpaper and gets almost jealous when she sees her sister-in-law looking at it and touching it. She even says “no person touches this pa...
...ssion and intrusiveness. John’s lack of having an open mind to his wife’s thoughts and opinions and his constant childish like treatment of his wife somehow emphasizes this point, although, this may not have been his intention. The narrator felt strongly that her thoughts and feelings were being disregarded and ignored as stated by the narrator “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman 115), and she shows her despise of her husband giving extra care to what he considers more important cases over his wife’s case with a sarcastic notion “I am glad my case is not serious!” (Gilman 115). It is very doubtful that John is the villain of the story, his good intentions towards doing everything practical and possible to help his wife gain her strength and wellbeing is clear throughout the story.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions which society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria. The narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression." In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with the help of a high social standing as a man, the narrator’s husband controls the narrator psychologically, causing her to take on a passive role in their marriage. There is an apparent imbalance of power in the marriage between John and the unnamed narrator as can be most prominently seen through the narrator’s medical care. One of the earliest indications of this imbalance is the fact that John is also the narrator’s physician. The narrator seems to feel a sense of hopelessness when it comes to her care and her life when she highlights that John has assured her friends and relatives that she has only “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” and even writes, “what is one to do?” (66). It is problematic that John has essentially taken two positions of power because he leaves the narrator with no one to turn to. She cannot dissent her diagnosis because her status is
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
“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 Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a woman who is trapped in a room covered in yellow wallpaper. The story is one that is perplexing in that the narrator is arguably both the protagonist as well as the antagonist. In the story, the woman, who is the main character, struggles with herself indirectly which results in her descent into madness. The main conflicts transpires between the narrator and her husband John who uses his power as a highly recognize male physician to control his wife by placing limitations on her, forcing her to behave as a sick woman. Hence he forced himself as the superior in their marriage and relationship being the sole decision make. Therefore it can be said what occurred externally resulted in the central conflict of” “The Yellow Wallpaper being internal. The narrator uses the wallpaper as a symbol of authenticy. Hence she internalizes her frustrations rather then openly discussing them.