Mentalism In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Wall-paper with crazy designs in a strange house could seem creepy to anyone, but to one woman it is the object that leads to her demise. The Yellow Wall-paper is about a woman who had a baby, and moved into a different house with her husband for the summer. She eventually goes crazy due to many things, but the focus is on the yellow wall-paper in the room. In The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the treatment of a woman and some odd yellow wall-paper causes her to go crazy. What started out as a nervous condition she gained after having a baby, quickly changed into insanity due to childlike treatment, the inability to connect with her baby, and her disgust and fixation with the wall-paper in the room her husband chose for them. …show more content…

This yellow wall-paper of all the papers is most significant because of the yellow color. Yellow is usually a happy color it stimulates the brain in a positive way (Changing Work). Irony is created in the story because the usual meaning of yellow contradicts how it affects the woman. From the beginning the majority of what the narrator talked about was the wall-paper, and how she hated it. She described it in many ways; she described the patterns, the colors, and anything else she imagined about it. Her description of it at one point was “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing” (653). The narrator from the beginning thought of the wall-paper in a negative way, but was constantly interested in figuring it out. The woman became obsessed with figuring out the wall-paper. At one point she was so intent on figuring out the mysteries of the wall-paper that she would stay awake at night, she admits that by saying “John was asleep and I hate to wake him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy” (652). She even got to where she thought there was a woman trapped in the wall-paper behind the front pattern, and that she moved and shook the paper. The narrator that she sees in the wall-paper is a representation of herself and how she has gone crazy. Paula A. Treichler explains “The woman in the wallpaper represents (1) the narrator herself, gone mad” (64). The woman she imagines causes her to be more and more interested in the wall-paper. The last night they were at the house, she was alone in the room and “As soon as it was moonlight and the poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her” (655). The woman’s obsession with the paper got so bad over time, that combined with the other negative factors in her life she became completely crazy. Her

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