Mental Breakdown In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Mental Breakdown In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, there are three main factors that lead up to the mental breakdown of the narrator. The narrator in this story is a woman who wants more from life than being a housewife. These factors are, her “nervous depression” (p.1670) in the beginning, the lack of contact with anyone but her husband throughout their stay at the colonial mansion, and the fact that she is locked in a room with such an eerie feeling. These three factors combined is enough to cause anyone have a mental breakdown. To begin with, the nervous depression that the narrator is suffering from starts the process of the mental breakdown. Her husband, John, says that “there is really nothing the matter with …show more content…

From the barred up windows, to the “smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (p.1671) wallpaper. The bars on the windows make the narrator feel as if she is trapped and cannot escape the awful torture of the wallpaper. Aside from the bars on the windows, the wallpaper is the main aspect that feeds into the narrator’s nervous depression, and causes her to experience a complete mental breakdown. The troubles all started when the narrator started following the pattern and noticing every twist and turn in the design. It then progressed to her seeing a woman behind bars in the pattern. Next, it became lifelike to her, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” (p.1675). Finally, when the narrator reaches the utmost of her mental breakdown she begins tearing off the wallpaper in hopes of freeing the woman trapped inside, only to discover she is the woman behind the pattern. “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard.” (p.1680) I believe by this point the narrator feels that her husband has controlled her so much, that it is like being trapped in a pattern, with no way

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