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What does the yellow wallpaper mean
What does the yellow wallpaper mean
The yellow wallpaper analysis essay
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Title: The Yellow Wallpaper
I think this title give the reader an old and scary feeling because of the word “yellow”. Based on the word “yellow wallpaper”, the reader can guess that it might happened in an old house or somewhere indoor that is old.
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-She was born in Hartford, Connecticut
-She had a painful and lonely childhood
-She married to an artist Charles Stetson
-She had extended period of depression, and the doctor told Charles did not let Gilman do anything. She needed to rest.
-Her depression inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”
-She devoiced with Charles in 1892, and married to George Houghton Gilman in 1900
Setting (Time, Place, Social Context-(Significance?)):
In a huge and old house that is inhered to the narrator. It was during summer or vacation time.
During the day, the narrator would write a little bit and look at the wallpaper. During night, she will look at the trapped woman.
-Resolution:
At the end, the narrator become insane. She start peeling the wallpaper and changed to a completely insane person.
Literary Elements
-Symbols:
-yellow wallpaper: to reflect the narrator is trap in the house and forbidden to do anything
-the metal bars window: the narrator wants the freedom to do something that she likes to do, but she is trapped
-Irony:
John thinks when they move to a new place, and the narrator can get more rest and she can get well soon. The ironic is the narrator did not get well, oppositely, she become insane.
Possible Themes or Purposes
I think the possible theme is “The Important to Express Yourself”. In the story, the narrator is wanting to please her husband and do whatever he wants her to do. I am thinking if she can stand for herself and tell john what she wants to do instead of feeling trapped. The ending can be different. Therefore, I think the theme is “The Important to Express
In addition, she always talks about the moonlight during these times of night. When the moonlight is not present, the narrator is not active. Her husband comes to visit and she does not do much. But at night, when her husband is sleeping, the narrator wakes up and starts walking around the room. The protagonist believes that there is a woman trapped by the wall, and that this woman only moves at night with the night light. The allusion to this light is not in the beginning of the story, but in the end. “She begins to strip of the wallpaper at every opportunity in order to free the woman she perceives is trapped inside. Paranoid by now, the narrator attempts to disguise her obsession with the wallpaper.” (Knight, p.81) In the description of the yellow wallpaper and what is seen behind it there are sinister implications that symbolize the closure of the woman. It implies that any intellectual activity is a deviation from their duties as a housewife. Her marriage seems to be claustrophobic as her won life, a stifling confinement for a woman's creativity. As imaginable, such treatment and "solitary confinement"(Knight, p.86) will do nothing but worsen her condition, affecting
The windows are barred, symbolizing the restrictive nature of the narrator’s mental condition. She is imprisoned within her mind. Her room was once a nursery, symbolizing that she is helpless and dependent on her husband’s care, similar to how a parent is reliant on the care of it’s parents, “… for the windows are barred for little children,” (Gilman 2). The narrator is not only trapped by her own mind and mental condition, but her husband’s wishes and expectations as well. The most significant symbol within the story is the yellow wallpaper. Initially, the narrator only views the wallpaper as something unpleasant, but over time she becomes fascinated with it’s formless pattern and tries to figure out how it’s organized. She discovers a sub-pattern within in it in which she distinguishes as a barred change with the heads of women that have attempted to escape the wallpaper like the woman she has been “seeing” moving within the wallpaper, “And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman 8). The yellow wallpaper is symbolic of a women’s place in society within the nineteenth century. It was not commonplace, or deemed acceptable, for women to be financially independent and/or engage in intellectual activity. The wallpaper is symbolic of those economic, intellectual, and social restrictions women were held to, as well as the domestic lives they were expected to lead. The narrator is so restricted by these social norms that her proper name is never given within the story, her only identity is “John’s wife”. At the climax of the story, the narrator identifies completely with the woman in the wallpaper and believes that by tearing the wallpaper, both she and the woman would be freed of their domestic prisons, “…there are so many of those
"The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.
Throughout the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” a sick wife must deal with an overprotective husband, which causes her internal battles with him and others around her. Her entire focus of life begins to wrap around this wallpaper. Through the use of symbolism and many prospects of ambiguities, the narrator of the “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Gilman, portrays the wife to either have the ability to see the dead, or she’s mentally crazy making up a fantasy world in her mind.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator was moved to a house far from society in the country, wherein she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serves to physically restrain her. "The windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls."(p218). Being exposed to the room's yellow wallpaper is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. "The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.(p224). All through the story the yellow paper 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 and reflection of the wallpaper causes her much travail. "I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless Johnston 2 pattern to some sort of a conclusion." (p221).
This quote proves the societal repression of women by using the figure in the wallpaper as a symbol of the main character, trying to escape the pattern of her daily life. She is beginning to see that what is making her depressed is having no control over her own life, she is trapped in the routine of being controlled by her husband. This quote is also an example of societal repression of women because she wants to get out of her life, get out of the room, and away from the wallpaper. The author included her change of view of the wallpaper at night in the moonlight as a way to show that when John isn’t paying attention she sees the flaws in him and her life, and realizes how much she would like to be free. She notices that there is someone trapped in the wallpaper and she later tries to help it escape, which symbolizes her escaping her pattern and encourages more women of her time to escape as well. The author used symbolism in order for the reader to understand how unhappy the women is with her role and expectations in her daily life. Prior to this quote, the narrator describes how the nursery is one of the less extravagant rooms in the house for
... seemingly trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, when she sees that constant face of the woman trapped inside, again she sees or is just seeing herself because her, herself is trapped and falling into insanity.
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.
The story take a place in a secluded mansion the family rented during the renovation of their home, but served as a place for her to undergo her treatment with the least stimulation possible, from her nervous breakdown. Doctors had diagnosed her with nervous depression and told her she “was forbidden to work, “from anything that could cause her excitement. For the most part her husband controlled her every move during her depression. She not only was prohibited to write, an outlet to express herself, from the inability to openly speak with her husband but is also place in a room that discomfort her. As the story continues we see her mental-health worsen although her appearance showed improvement, when she imagines a woman in the pattern of the wallpaper of her room. The narrator becomes obsessive and spends most her time tired and staring at the wallpaper. Until a few day before they leave that home she goes insane and begins to tear the wallpaper which frightens her husband but allows the character to feel
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.
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
The color yellow has many different meanings. It can bring hope and happiness but it can also bring cowardice and deceit. The shade of yellow tells the whole story. Bright, beautiful shades usually denote cheerfulness or joy but it can also have a hint of danger. Dull, dingy shades usually denote caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy. The dull and dingy yellow sets the scene for this dramatic story. The story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has many symbolic undertones throughout the story but none as great as the yellow wallpaper being a symbol for the main character’s sanity as well as her entrapment both physically and mentally.
In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman and her husband have rented a mansion for the summer so she can recuperate from the recent birth of their child. She rests in an upstairs room, a former nursery, with peeling yellow wallpaper, which becomes her obsession. She describes its color as repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow with dull yet lurid orange in some places. She emphasizes its unpleasantness by exclaiming, “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.”
The yellow wallpaper can be interpreted to embody many qualities regarding the narrator. The narrator exclaims: “It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman 316). The color yellow is often associated with sickness or weakness, and the narrator’s mysterious illness is a case in point of her husband’s oppression on the narrator. The connection to the color and the narrator may also imply how the narrator despises herself. She even states the wallpaper “…Used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house-to reach the smell. But now I am used to it…” (Gilman 317). This exposes her inward perception of herself. She feels gross and disturbed by herself but has become used to being treated
Driving a women to do outrageous things and even losing her mind. For example, John believed that the treatment that would cure Jane’s state of mind would be isolating her in a very small room away from her child, her friends and family that including her husband. This room had barred windows, a nailed down bed and one window and a wallpaper. The only view she had was what her eye can see from the one window in her room. Fantasizing about the garden that she got a view from and everything near her. After spending time in that room all alone with no communication whatsoever Jane’s main focus became the wallpaper. It was yellow wallpaper, with a confusing pattern and had an unexplainable smell to it. In the moonlight Jane started observing a woman that appeared on the paper. Eventually this wallpaper led her to lose her mind along with her husband's actions. Jane said, “In spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!”(10). Jane spent so much time analyzing that wallpaper that she ended up believing that she was the women that was “trapped” in the wallpaper, she decided to take action a freed the women by tearing up the wallpaper so that the women can escape. However, she was no longer “Jane” she was now the women who had been freed. Although, John believe that locking her in a room would be the solution to Jane it ended up being the cause of her delusion.