In 1892 Author, Poet, and Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a heart gripping short story that would shock the world and bring awareness to a serious illness of depression called The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte was not just an ordinary author, she was intelligent, courageous, creative and also a social activist who believed in independent economic status for women. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Bio. Par. 4) Unfortunately, Charlotte also battled severe depression in her life time, and had to seek constant treatment for nervous breakdowns that would cloud her mind, she also brought light to her depressive illness by tapping into her deep inner-creative imagination. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Bio. Par. 3) Indeed Perkin’s short story The Yellow …show more content…
Her nervous state of being is almost driving her insane as she starts to focus on objects in the house such as: the heavy furniture, open spaces, and most important the yellow wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper surrounds her room and she turns her attention towards it in order to figure out its pattern and representation. Initially, she describes the wallpaper as being, “repellant, revolting, a smoldering unclean yellow, and strangely faded by the slow turning-sunlight. (Perkins-Gillman, Charlotte par.36) This insinuates her fear and sheer displeasure regarding the wallpaper. It is almost as if the yellow wallpaper is psychologically taunting her. By further examining the wallpaper and room she relates it to a children’s nursery, and her imagination begins to ponder in regards to how the imaginary children felt. Her creative imagination is making the worst out of a simplistic room in which she resides in. Consequently, her fixation grows deeper, darker, more intense, and far more dangerous to her mental …show more content…
John continues to underline her depressive illness, and more importantly she is now completely under the false illusion of the yellow wallpaper. Its patterns, structure, smell, and basic fixture fascinates her to the point of obsession and insanity. As the narrator examines the wallpaper she starts to fixate on the pattern which seems to be basic, however, she starts seeing a woman behind bars. (Gothic and the Female Voice…) In her own mind this woman is trapped and wants out like a prisoner behind bars struggling for her freedom. Although the woman behind bars is not real, she can relate to pattern. She is looking at an image of herself⎯ trapped, secluded, and overwhelmed with anxiety. The narrator has completely fallen into lost in false illusion that has become dangerous to her mental health. One might ask, “where is John?” “Why isn’t he of help as her struggle is now so severe?” It seems as though John simply does not care. John is so egotistical as he is under the false illusion that she is getting better. This is evident as he laughs at her and mentions her increased appetite and will. (Perkins-Gillman, Charlotte Par.51, 135) Indeed John is sadly mistaking her fixation that has overwhelmed her body to the point of complete insanity and ruinous
Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” during the late 1800s and explained her bouts of depression due to her failing marriage.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator weaves a tale of a woman with deep seeded feelings of depression. Her husband, a physician, takes her to a house for a span of three months where he puts her in a room to recuperate. That “recuperation” becomes her nemesis. She is so fixated on the “yellow wallpaper” that it seems to serve as the definition of her bondage. She gradually over time begins to realize what the wallpaper seems to represents and goes about plotting ways to overcome it. In a discussion concerning the wallpaper she states, “If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.” “There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to show how women’s mental illness is addressed in the time. Women were treated as the lesser or weaker sex. Women’s mental illness was highly misunderstood and misdiagnosed. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” illustrates a feminist approach to mental disease. Gilman uses this work to reach out to others to help them understand a woman’s treacherous descent into depression and psychosis. There are many contributing factors to the narrator’s illness and it is easy to see the effect the men have on her. Women were treated very differently and often outcast if they did not meet a certain norm. Mental illness is one of the main factors men believe
The inner feral nature of mankind is indifferent to rationality when the mind body or soul is trapped and unable to find an escape. Human beings are animals in nature, and often when a situation arises when they are, or feel trapped, they begin to lose sense of rationality and their grip on reality, and instead make unsettling and nonsensical decisions. Within “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather, the effects of a human being being trapped are explored in two different ways through two different people with very different personalities. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a young woman named Jane, who suffers from what she calls a “nervous weakness”, and what she writes about what she goes
The story of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins is one of the most famous accounts of madness in 19th century literature; taking the form of a woman’s journal who is receiving treatment for mental illness. Through the journal, she records her experiences and her mental life as she descends into what appears to be complete madness. Perkins is keen to stress both the singular experience of mental illness and ways in which this condition is manipulated and exacerbated by those around her. I will make the argument that it is possible to see the story as possessing a critical attitude towards contemporary social and gender relations in regards to Perkins view of androcentrism.
Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.
As readers know, the narrator was barred from doing any “exciting” or strenuous activities such as reading, writing, or even visiting family members. Therefore, the only “interesting” source of mental stimulation available to her was the yellow wallpaper in her “prison”, thus resulting in her increasing infatuation. The start of her obsession begins after John’s refusal to let the narrator move to another room, which is when readers first uncover her disgust towards the wallpaper, as shown when she writes, “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long” (Gilman). But, her hatred doesn’t stop there, for after a failed attempt to persuade John to remove the wallpaper, her repugnance only intensifies as she begins to read further and further into the wallpaper. The narrator states, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (Gilman), which shows that she is beginning to visualize disturbing images in it. However, her obsession truly takes a life of its own after John refuses to let the narrator visit her relatives, as this is when she begins to believe that the wallpaper is a “alive”. It is after
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s bodies of work, Gilman highlights scenarios exploring traditional interrelations between man and woman while subtexting the necessity for a reevaluation of the paradigms governing these relations. In both of Gilman’s short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Turned”, women are victimized, subjected and mistreated. Men controlled and enslaved their wives because they saw them as their property. A marriage was male-dominated and women’s lives were dedicated to welfare of home and family in perseverance of social stability. Women are expected to always be cheerful and good-humored. Respectively, the narrator and Mrs. Marroner are subjugated by their husbands in a society in which a relationship dominated by the male is expected.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature 's Ancestral House: Another Look At 'The Yellow Wallpaper '." Women 's Studies 12.2 (1986): 113. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
As the narrator makes this discovery, the reader can observe how the wallpaper is now central to the plot. “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you across the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream”(The Yellow Wallpaper, Page 81, Paragraph 4). In the following paragraph, it is apparent that her mind is now consumed by the yellow wallpaper and perplexing patterns, thus becoming essential within the plot. An indication that the crawling women is the narrator herself, is evident when John’s sister, Jennie spoke, “Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched and that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes, and John’s, and she wished we would be more careful”( The Yellow Wallpaper, Page 82, Paragraph 3). The pattern within the yellow wallpaper has now become the narrator's main objective. She becomes insane trying to release the woman stuck inside, which resembles herself being trapped within her own life. An example of this can be seen observed in the following line, “As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” ( The Yellow Wallpaper, Page 85, Paragraph 2-3). The narrator’s suffering from the degree she is at, getting worse and worse within her deliria shes find the truth. The contrast between the unknown narrator and questionable women helps to reveal the significance and development of the yellow wallpaper throughout the story. From John’s constant constraints, the horrid wallpaper, and not being able to write, the narrator becomes creative through her hysteria envisioning a woman, who self subconsciously
All through the story the yellow wallpaper acts as an antagonist causing her to become very annoyed and disturbed. There is nothing to do in the secluded room but stare at the wallpaper. The narrator tells of the haphazard pattern having no organization or symmetrical plot. Her constant examination of and reflection o...
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
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 uses her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to express her opinions about feminism and originality. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman's psychological disorder, her entire mental state characterized by her encounters with the wallpaper in her room. She incorporates imagery and symbolism to show how confined the narrator is because of her gender and mental illness.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through such treatments. Because of her experience with the rest cure, it can even be said that Gilman based the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" loosely on herself. But I believe that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman/women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.