No person is inherently mad; humans have caused other humans to drown their own sanity which can then submerge that person into an ocean of madness. Historically, madness had become a common occurrence with women due to several stress factors they must endure on a daily basis: finding a husband, baring children, raising children, find a suitable job, retaining femininity, and more. Authors Charlotte Gilman and Jhumpa Lahiri explored the psyche of two women who were facing very stressful situations. Gilman’s The Yellow-Wallpaper, introduces her readers to an unnamed nineteenth century woman who is slowly falling into madness. The protagonist must endure the “rest cure” where she must live without artistic expression, human contact, or freedom to go where she pleases. After months of enduring, she is ultimately shoved into madness by her husband, whom originally started her treatment. Lahiri’s protagonist, Aparna, is forced into an arranged marriage, and then moves to Boston with her new husband to live a new life with their daughter, Usha. Aparna is being neglected by her husband, finds it difficult to adjust to Boston culture, and spends most of her time being a house wife. She finally finds a friend, and possibly a love, in another Bengali man named Pranab. Once he was engaged and then married, Aparna revels to Usha that she was on the brink of committing suicide. Both characters were being controlled and had little to no say in what they could or could not do. These restraints with the added on stress that they faced cause both to the edge of madness. Women who had to withstand the struggles of doing what is expected of them while still attempting to do what they desire encounter many restraints that force them to stray away fr...
... middle of paper ...
...self-expression can then lose themselves.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte P. "Gilman, Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman, Why I Wrote The
Yellow Wallpaper. The Forerunner, 1913. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper” DiYanni, Robert. The Yellow
Wallpaper. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 6th ed. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2007. 542-52. Print.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Hell-Heaven” DiYanni, Robery. Hell-Heaven. Literature: Reading
Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. 348-361. Print.
Muhi, Maysoon T. ""Much Madness Is the Divinest Sense": Madness in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"" "Much Madness Is the Divinest Sense": Madness in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (2009): 1-17.Isaj.net. College of
Education for Women University of Baghdad, 2009. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. The New England Magazine. Reprinted in "Lives & Moments - An Introduction to Short Fiction" by Hans Ostrom. Hold,
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 1684-1695.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" Ed. Catherine Lavender; The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, Fall Semester, Oct. 1997. (25 Jan 1999) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The Story and Its Writer. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 462-473. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte P. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The story and its writer: An introduction to short fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 340-351.
“I never saw so much expression in an inanimate object before.” (The Yellow Wallpaper) In order to understand Charlotte Gilman’s stories one must first know about the life she lead. In 1884 Charlotte married her husband Charles Walter Stetson and began to sink into depression. During this time Gilman wrote her famous story The Yellow Wallpaper (Radcliffe). Within the story the reader can pick out parts of Gilman’s own life woven into it. Gilman, like the main character Jane had postpartum depression as a result of this she divorced Stetson and sent their daughter to live with him and his second wife. In 1900 Gilman subsequently married her first cousin George Houghton Gilman. Unlike her first marriage this one was happy and fulfilling until
Johnson, Greg. "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" Studies in Short Fiction 26:4 (Fall 1989): 521-30.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"—Writing Women." EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web. Web. 05 Mar. 2011.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper"." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Concise Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 1597-1609. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. 354-65. Print.
Wohlpart, Jim. American Literature Research and Analysis Web Site. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”” 1997. Florida Gulf Coast University
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in it's quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce (Lauter 799). Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction To Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. 7th Ed. New York, Norton, 1998. 2: 630-642.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Mineola: Dover, 1997. Print.