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Literary analysis of the yellow wallpaper
Symbolism in yellow wallpaper
Symbolism in yellow wallpaper
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The Yellow Wallpaper is narrated by the main character in the story. From the way the story is told and written, we all know that the narrator is a female. She also states that her husband is named John. The jist of the story is that John and her brother are physicians who diagnosed her with temporary nervous depression. Of course she disagrees and thinks she is just sick. They thought it was in her best interest to rest and do no work what so ever. During this time they stayed in an old inherited home that was off by itself. This was a place where she could get plenty of rest, exercise, and air. While staying at this place, John was always gone for work but did not allow her to write about herself or situation. They felt it would make her …show more content…
The inherited old house in which they stayed in was distant from other surroundings. She states in the story that “The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. (page 2)” Another location is the nursery room she stayed in at the top of the inherited house. “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls” (page 2). From this passage one can tell she feels like a child because of the setting of the room. More specifically, the yellow wallpaper in the room bothered her a lot. In the passage she states that “ The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off the paper - in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.(page 2) “ She was very unpleased with yellow wall paper. She continues to describe the wallpaper after this point as “suicidal”, irritant, “lame”, “revolting”, and “unclean” (page 3). After John decided not to repair the wallpaper, she became use to it and started to write and examine the wall paper instead of talking about
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.
...men have more authority and are better than woman and he dismissed all his wife’s fears, which led to her madness. The narrator eventually breaks from the chains that her husband had put on her, which shows how anyone can escape from entrapment. By tearing down the yellow wallpaper the narrator finds a kind of liberty and freedom from her submissive relationship with her husband. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a great story that demonstrates how a person needs stand up for him or herself to be free of what is holding them back from life.
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 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...
This male dominance led the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” into loneliness and eventually to a place of no return. The alienation is shown in terms of the setting, "The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. " The house that the couple rented for three months represents the woman’s physical imprisonment and symbolizes her isolation. Moreover, the nursery that John recommends his wife to live in includes many confining elements.
“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...
In eighteen ninety - one, when the "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written, women were often treated as second - class citizens. They were, for the most part, dominated by a society controlled by men. The men were the leaders, ruling the home and the workplace; the women were under their authority. The wife, of whom this story is about, reflects this attitude society has towards her. Her husband even decides what furniture and things are to be in her room. She submits to those decisions, even to the point of agreeing with him. This is evidenced when she says, "But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things……I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim"(472). Wives like this were regarded as possessions of the husbands, and, in light of that, they had few rights. Just as was the wife, many women were believed to be good only for bearing children and running a household. Often times the husband retained a housekeeper or some such servant so the wives only bore children and did little else. In the case of the wife in our story, her husband, John, ...
The wallpaper increasingly becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning, finding a woman trying to break free. Over time, she identifies completely with this woman - with the bars in her own room - and believes she is also trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper she believes that she has broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. The wallpaper 's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced sickness and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight (see Sunlight as oppressive, moonlight as liberating, below). By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is the first stage in a feminist uprising; though the early feminists had to hide in the shadows, they paved the way for later generations to walk with heads held
The Yellow Wallpaper is a very unique and odd story. In the first read through of the story, the reader is aware that the narrator is sick and losing her mind. Over the course of the story it becomes apparent that the treatment used to heal the narrator isn’t effective. As she begins to completely lose her mind the reader gets a glimpse into her mind. She believes that she is trapped inside of the wallpaper, and by ripping it off the wall she can escape. There are several topics that seem to occur in this story. These topics include Feminism, the role of women in the 1880’s period, and knowledge and understanding of mentally ill. Although these are some of the main points in the story, The Yellow Wallpaper has several topics that are direct
The Yellow Wallpaper was written as a realism story. It showed how woman felt they had the same opportunities as men in their personal choices. In this story, the woman expressed her worries to her husband who through good intentions, required that his wife stay in bed 24/7, and not do any of the things she would normally do. In effect his wife became worse until she reached the limit. The behavior of the husband at this time was completely normal. Men were the higher power over women and women, like the one in this story, felt that they couldn?t stand count for themselves.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main theme is confinement. The narrator is confined to a single room in a huge house. Her husband often spends his nights in town, to fulfill his role as a doctor. The narrator attempts to deal with her fears and isolation. Due to her confinement, she starts losing her sanity (Perkins 175). It can be seen that the narrator slowly turns mad. Her mind turns into a chaotic situation and she starts seeing shapes in the wallpaper. However, in reality, there is no woman entrapped in the wallpaper. The narrator thinks that way because she starts losing her grip on
The Yellow Wallpaper is a story, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although the work is short, it is one of the most interesting works in existence. Gilman uses literary techniques very well. The symbolism of The Yellow Wallpaper, can be seen and employed after some thought and make sense immediately. The views and ideals of society are often found in literary works. Whether the author is trying to show the ills of society of merely telling a story, culture is woven onto the words. The relationship between the narrator and her husband would be disagreeable to a modern woman's relationship. Today, most women crave equality with their partner. The reader never learns the name of the narrator, perhaps to give the illusion that she could be any woman. On the very fist page of The Yellow Wall-Paper, Gilman illustrates the male dominated society and relationship. It was customary for men to assume that their gender knew what, when, how, and why to do things. John, the narrator's husband, is a prominent doctor and both his and his wife's words and actions reflect the aforementioned stereotype: "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage," (9). This statement illustrates the blatant sexism of society at the time. John does not believe that his wife is sick, while she is really suffering from post-partum depression. He neglects to listen to his wife in regard to her thoughts, feelings, and health through this thought pattern. According to him, there is not anything wrong with his wife except for temporary nerve issues, which should not be serious.
In the short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator chooses to write about a married woman in a new home who ultimately falls down into a spiral of insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper centers primarily on the narrator and her discovery in the room she must stay in to rest. There she sees a yellow wallpaper that soon begins to take the form of a woman who is trapped, and is shaking the wallpaper in order to get out. The narrator continues trying to figure out the wallpaper and its pattern until eventually deciding to rip the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the creeping woman trapped inside. Thus, the narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper suffers a mental collapse by going insane in her attempt to understand the wallpaper which can be attributed