The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, is a feminist short story. It is about a woman who is mentally ill and gets misdiagnosed by her controlling husband. He puts her in a room saying doing nothing will cure her. While in the room she becomes captivated by the yellow wallpaper. She starts to see a trapped woman in the wallpaper.
Additionally, the isolated treatments provided by her husband plays a great role in her breakdown and her animalistic behaviors exhibited upon her husband’s return. From the beginning of the story it is clear that John, the husband and physician, is attempting to seclude his wife from societal influences and jail her from escaping his control and treatment methods. The narrator describes the physical confinements of the colonial mansion to have a d... ... middle of paper ... ...ment she becomes the victim and prisoner of her own insanity. The narrator’s journey into insanity is caused by her husband isolating her from societal influences and also the long period of time in which she was imprisoned without anything or anyone to stimulate her intellect. While some critics may claim that she was insane upon entering the mansion, it is clear that she was able to think and reason well and be able to hypothesize during the first few weeks of her confinement.
Women’s Freedom Through the Discourse In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she writes about a woman who suffers from temporary nervous depression as diagnosed by her overbearing husband, who is a doctor. The husband, John, is condescending towards his wife when she questions his diagnosis. Therefore, to get away from the confinement of not being able to speak for herself, the woman secretly writes in her journal as a sense of relief. The woman becomes fascinated and engrossed with the yellow wallpaper that hangs in her bedroom. She comes to the realization that a woman is trapped inside the wallpaper so she must tear it down to set the woman free.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Gilman, is a story of a woman overcome by depression after giving birth to her first child. Her husband John, a physician, diagnoses the condition as womanly hysteria. John, being “practical in the extreme” (284), takes charge of the means to her recovery through his knowledge and power over his wife. Due to the way he exercises his high status as a man, John is consequently more of a factor in his wife’s mental decline than the condition itself. In the beginning of the story, the first thing John does to exercise his power is to isolate his wife from family, friends, and society as a whole.
Gilman focuses on a sense in why gender roles consequences are made by male-dominated societies back in the nineteenth century. Gilman represents a marriage in which the narrator and her husband are trapped because of their irresponsibility. Because of this the narrator and her husband fail to come to an agreement. The woman suffers from a disorder called, post pardon syndrome. Due to this syndrome instead of her husband loving her, he tends to misguide her by loving her at a distance.
Interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” Domineering and neglectful spouse causes his wife to lose her sanity. This is a story about how a woman’s arrogant husband drives her to insanity by forcing her to spend so much time alone. After spending months in her bedroom looking at yellow wallpaper which she despises, her imagination begins taking over her mind. She believes a woman is trapped inside of it. By the end of the story she actually thinks she is the woman who had been trapped in the wallpaper and has finally escaped from it.
The narrator’s breakdown had many contributing factors, but one mainly being the flawed human nature and environment. Her husband is indisposed to the fact that women are more than capable to control their own life and that the setting of ones comfort is fully vital to their health too. This seclusion and isolation method of this medicine only allows her mind to venture down the route to insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the wallpaper and the relationship of the couple to expose the narrator’s confinement forced by the husband to lead her to insanity. Exemplifying the nineteenth-century oppression of woman and their well-being.
This traditional idea has made this woman afraid to stand up for herself. At the end of the story, the depression has made this woman become mentally insane and respect is one major theme of this story. Different levels of education in a marriage will give women a lot of pressures. In Gilman’s story, John controls his wife just by being a doctor. “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 [...]” (154).
After which, he confesses his affection to her and states that he had affection to her ever since she came to New Orleans, He then shockingly rapes her. Weeks later, Blanche is suffering from a mental breakdown, she had told Stella what Stanley has done and because of Stella's mistrust of her own sister she chooses Stanley's side. With nothing else to do to help her sister Stella sends Blanche to an asylum. Blanche's past has ruined her to the point where when she is truthfully right no one would believe her because of her own past. By living a life of deception, misconceptions, and loneliness she has ruined her life and The symbolism of the Tennessee Williams title "A Streetcar Named Desire" is ironic.
The setting of the room symbolizes the loneliness the narrator is undergoing. The narrator has her mind encased that there is a woman struggling and in her solitary room, she feels its true and she is even seen fighting for her. The author used the room to symbolize what the main character was going through all alone in the isolated estate where she was brought by her husband. The yellow paper played a distinct reason for the narrator’s madness. In her writings, she explains that the more she became insane, the more the wall paper became a big issue to her that is why she smudged ultimately.