In Charlotte Bronte’s’, The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is healthy until her husband, John moves her into a new house where she is confined and is in solitude. The Yellow Wallpaper makes Charlotte Bronte go mad, mentally and physically. Charlotte’s husband, John believes since she is sickly he should confine her in an attic with a cure called The Rest Cure which means the patient can not do anything but sit around their room all day. I chose this story because of the intense amount of detail in the room as well as with Bronte’s rapidly changing personality. When Charlotte first arrives at the house she says “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house” (Stetson, 647). Immediately when Charlotte arrives she begins …show more content…
Bronte has been confined for a couple of weeks at this point and begins to see a woman moving in the wallpaper because she is becoming lonely. “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Stetson, 652). She begins to think that as the amount of sunlight changes in the room so does the wallpaper, “When the sun shoots in through the east window- I always watch for that first long, straight ray- it changes so quickly that I never can believe it” (Stetson, 653). “By moonlight- the moon shines in all night when there is a moon- I wouldn’t know it was the same paper” (Stetson, 653). She says with when it is dark outside and then a light in the room turns on whether it be a candle or lamp it looks as if the wallpaper becomes a jail for the woman that is stuck behind the yellow wallpaper. Bronte says besides the light changes that scare her, the wallpaper also smells. She says that the wallpaper smells only when it has not been sunny with a lot of air rushing into the room. The whole house smells of the wallpaper and so does she. Bronte says it is “A yellow smell” (Stetson, 654). Bronte begins to see the woman more and more, in the sunlight the woman will not move but when there is a spot of darkness or shade, the woman will “take hold of the bars and shake them hard” (Stetson, …show more content…
Physically she is confined to the house and the bed, mentally she is confined to only thinking about the same things (the woman behind the wallpaper) all day everyday since she is stuck in the same room for a long period of time. Bronte is extremely influenced by her situation, she got to the house not mentally sick but as the story goes on she becomes extremely mentally ill. The space makes you think she could possibly be in a mental hospital since it is in the middle of nowhere and she is confined to her room. John could just be visiting her and that why there is such a certain amount of time she is in this room and as to why the furniture could be bolted to the floor and bars are on the
The beginning of the novel starts out with a picture of a peaceful home that is very similar to the Moor House Jane lives in while visiting her cousins. It even states in line 2 that Bronte feels like the place is familiar. There is “marshland stretched for miles” ( ln 1) outside the home like the land of England in Jane Eyre. This common setting is also connecting how much Charlotte Bronte is like her character Jane. Dunn describes Bronte as “passionate [and] assertive” (ln 12) which is much like Jane Eyre’s character. Bronte is also said to not “come back to complain or haunt” (ln 20), and she lives in a “mod...
The wallpaper in her bedroom is a hideous yellow. "It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others" (pg 393) The wallpaper is symbolic of the sickness the author has by the end of the story. Yellow is often a color associated with illness. It’s been suggested that she herself was clawing at the paper during moments of insanity. But there are many times when she is sane, and sees the marks on the wallpaper, and she writes about how others who had spent time in this room tried to remove the paper as well.
In everyday day life we go through changes and sometimes we even break down to the point we do not know what to do with ourselves, but in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story” The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is an obsessive person. The story focuses on a woman who is going through postpartum depression and has had a nervous breakdown. Her husband John moves her into a home where he wants her to rest in isolation to recover from her disorder. Throughout her time in the room the narrator discovers new things and finally understands life.
Jane’s new home seems to make her feel very uncomfortable from the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper” when she states “that there is something queer about it.” She says that John tells her the vacation home will be a good place for her, but even seems unsure of that proclamation herself (Gilman 956). Jane begins to describe her environment and speaks of how she is unsure of exactly what the room was used for before her arrival. She speaks of bars on the windows and strange rings on the wall. More significantly she speaks of the “repellant” and “revolting” wallpaper on the wall that seems to disturb Jane a deal more than any of the other odd décor in the room. She also speaks of how the children must have really hated it and that is why is has been peeled off in places (Gilman 957). The wallpaper continues to bother Jane throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”, but Jane also begins to dislike her husband.
Bronte allows the reader to see the loneliness that Jane is experiencing at Gateshead Hall, by showing the relationship between her and birds. Dismissed from conversation with Mrs. Reed and the Reed children Jane retreats to a window seat and disappears into her own imaginative world with Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds. She is concerned more with the illustrations than the text, she states "the letter-press I cared little for, generally speaking" (20; ch. 1). Through these illustrations, Jane is able to relate to the feeling of solitude expressed by the pictures. One drawing in particular that Jane observe...
Stetson made it clear in “The Yellow Wallpaper” that women in the Victorian era were portrayed less than men. In contrast, Stetson also makes it clear to readers that no certain gender role determines the abilities of men and women. While the narrator struggles with clinical depression, she strives to free herself of her husband’s authority over her. As Stetson, a feminist conveys the difficult hardships women went through during this time, and she was desired to change the society of women
The wallpaper in The Yellow Wallpaper represents the societal barriers oppressing women. In the beginning, the narrator, Jane, is very skeptical of the wallpaper but does not question it, thus emphasizing how she is trapped by this oppression. However, as the story progresses, she starts to become more intrigued by it. The wallpaper runs parallel to Jane’s life. The more she observes the patterns, the more she acknowledges that in order to seek liberation, she must resist these restrictions placed by the patriarchal society.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator is moving into a house that she is renting while her house in being renovated. She describes the house as "The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people" (105). This quote reflects that she considers this house as a place only the noble could live in. She has only read about homes like this, and she never thought that she would be living in one. She seems happy that she will be able to rent such a house. She adds that "There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden--large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them" (105). This adds to the elegant and royal qualities that the narrator believes the house has.
The narrator tears and rips at the wallpaper by day to release the image from behind the pattern that haunts her at night. During the day she refrains from looking out the windows because "there are so many of those creeping women" and she begins to "wonder if they all came out of the wallpaper" as she did (668). She represents the struggle of being so close to freedom from the dominating male society but not able to free her spirit from confines of her own world just yet.
The wallpaper symbolizes the trapped narrator and the structure of the tradition. Also, Elisa’s chrysanthemums are discarded and the narrator’s feelings are disowned which portrays the rejection of women. Elisa ends up “crying weakly like an old woman” and settles for wine (233). The narrator’s actions lead to her husband fainting “but he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time” (447). The narrator is insane and causes faintness in her husband, hoping that she now has an escape. To conclude, John Steinbecks “The Chrysanthemums” and Charloette Perkins “The Yellow Wallpaper” show two different outcomes mainly arisen due to being trapped inside an isolated house or a garden and having a limited life under a husband's control.
Immediately from the start Bronte’s character Jane is different. She is an orphan, mis-treated and despised by her family. She has no clear social position, is described as “less than a servant” and treated like one. A protagonist who one would assume had no characteristics worth aspiring too. Jane is displayed perfectly in her hiding behind the curtain. She is placed by a window, which beyond is icy and cold, contrasting immensely from the inside of the fire and warmth. A clear statement of the icy coldness of the family she has been put to live with, and her fiery and passionate nature which we discover th...
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.
The windows are barred, symbolizing the restrictive nature of the narrator’s mental condition. She is imprisoned within her mind. Her room was once a nursery, symbolizing that she is helpless and dependent on her husband’s care, similar to how a parent is reliant on the care of it’s parents, “… for the windows are barred for little children,” (Gilman 2). The narrator is not only trapped by her own mind and mental condition, but her husband’s wishes and expectations as well. The most significant symbol within the story is the yellow wallpaper. Initially, the narrator only views the wallpaper as something unpleasant, but over time she becomes fascinated with it’s formless pattern and tries to figure out how it’s organized. She discovers a sub-pattern within in it in which she distinguishes as a barred change with the heads of women that have attempted to escape the wallpaper like the woman she has been “seeing” moving within the wallpaper, “And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman 8). The yellow wallpaper is symbolic of a women’s place in society within the nineteenth century. It was not commonplace, or deemed acceptable, for women to be financially independent and/or engage in intellectual activity. The wallpaper is symbolic of those economic, intellectual, and social restrictions women were held to, as well as the domestic lives they were expected to lead. The narrator is so restricted by these social norms that her proper name is never given within the story, her only identity is “John’s wife”. At the climax of the story, the narrator identifies completely with the woman in the wallpaper and believes that by tearing the wallpaper, both she and the woman would be freed of their domestic prisons, “…there are so many of those
Through the narrator’s obsession with the wall, she begins to envision a woman, that is trapped behind the Yellow Wallpaper. “By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.” (pg. 166) From this line, it is made clear to the reader that the pattern of the wall symbolizes the social constraints women face daily. While the woman behind the wallpaper is just a figment of the narrator’s imagination, she metaphorically represents the speaker and her desperation to break free of the mental and physical oppression that has been placed upon her not only by her husband but also society as well; this is seen in the line “I suppose I shall have to get backs behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard”
The short story titled, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is given its name for no other reason than the disturbing yellow wallpaper that the narrator comes to hate so much; it also plays as a significant symbol in the story. The wallpaper itself can represent many various ideas and circumstances, and among them, the sense of feeling trapped, the impulse of creativity gone awry, and what was supposed to be a simple distraction transfigures into an unhealthy obsession. By examining the continuous references to the yellow wallpaper itself, one can begin to notice how their frequency develops the plot throughout the course of the story. As well as giving the reader an understanding as to why the wallpaper is a more adequate and appropriate symbol to represent the lady’s confinement and the deterioration of her mental and emotional health. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the color of the wallpaper symbolizes the internal and external conflicts of the narrator that reflect the expectations and treatment of the narrator, as well as represent the sense of being controlled in addition to the feeling of being trapped.