Society in the 19th century placed in citizen’s mind that writers and people with mental disorders should be confined. Zott stated “They also acknowledge a certain degree of confinement as a condition of their art” (Zott P5). The article talks about how writers think that because of their art they should be confined. The prisons back then had lots of immovable furniture, which made their madness worse by them being so confined in one area. John S. Bak states again “She is bothered by the immovable bed but gnaws on its leg to free it; and she even remains curiously dispassionate about being shackled with the rings.” (Balk... ... middle of paper ... ...low Wallpaper “: An Autobiography of Emotions.
Gilman only conveys the image of a woman creeping around her room, who is suffering from anxiety and madness. The woman is under the care of her husband, who is an physician. He locks her in an nursery in hopes that the confinement and rest will help aid her troubling nervous condition. The woman seems to be losing her grasp and control over her own life, primarily because she is under the care of her husband. As the narrator opens the story, the first striking image that the readers are presented with is the character John.
Even though the narrator’s obsession of figuring out the wallpaper’s pattern is the primary impetus that causes her to go insane, there is a greater underlying reason as to why this happened. The yellow wallpaper, combined, with the rest of the room, serves as a symbol of Gilman’s critique of confinement of both women in marriage and the mentally ill, which the narrator suffers
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a tragedy illustrated from the point of view of a woman, whose name is not mentioned, that suffered from a nervous disorder and goes through her journey to insanity. Ironically, the root to her insanity is her husband’s attempts to recuperate her mental health by prescribing her rest cure treatment during their stay in a colonial house. The author conveys messages of gender inequality, social bias, and the struggle women faced in the nineteenth century by using first-person narration with the help of symbolism. Underlying the story are symbols of male oppression of women in the nineteenth century, symbols such as the yellow wallpaper, the barred window, and the oppressive room. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes male
In Charlotte Bronte’s’, The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is healthy until her husband, John moves her into a new house where she is confined and is in solitude. The Yellow Wallpaper makes Charlotte Bronte go mad, mentally and physically. Charlotte’s husband, John believes since she is sickly he should confine her in an attic with a cure called The Rest Cure which means the patient can not do anything but sit around their room all day. I chose this story because of the intense amount of detail in the room as well as with Bronte’s rapidly changing personality. When Charlotte first arrives at the house she says “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house” (Stetson, 647).
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman details a semi-autobiographical, yet fictional, story of a woman suffering from neurasthenia and postpartum depression after her pregnancy. The story is told from the woman 's point-of-view from her journal entries, which are written in secrecy. Her husband secluded her in a special room and took multiple precautions in an attempt to cure her of her depression. The treatment that the woman underwent in the story was referred to as "rest cure" during the late 1800s and was later abandoned as a practice. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a critique of the rest cure and depicts how the treatment’s requirements lead to further depression and mental health issues.
Gilman does so by t... ... middle of paper ... ...she sees in the wallpaper is trapped behind the pattern, just like the narrator is trapped in the room. The woman’s mental status gets so deteriorated that she has a breaking point when she “escapes” her imprisonment. The author writes, “Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor” (320). Taking down the wallpaper symbolizes her finally freeing herself. Charlotte Gilman accomplishes her goal of spreading awareness about the oppression of women by forcing the readers to dig deep into The Yellow Wallpaper.
The story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is the story of a woman who is mentally ill. She is being taken care of by her husband who is a doctor. They have just moved into a new house where she has her own room. Her room is only a bed that is nailed to the floor, and the room is covered in a gaudy and strange yellow wallpaper.After moving into the room the woman, who is also the narrator of the story, starts to see very strange things. She believes that there is a woman trying to escape from the wallpaper. She also starts to see other women “creeping” around the walkways outside.
Critics may claim that the insanity that the wife suffers from was not the cause of her treatments but existed early in her childhood and that the room in which she occupies is in an insane asylum. However, over the course of time her seclusion makes her fixate on yellow wallpaper in her room. Eventually her fascination of the wallpaper becomes an obsession and she begins to fantasize of imprisoned women behind the paper. By the end of the story she can no longer distinguish fiction from reality and eventually looses any sanity that she held in the beginning of the story. Additionally, the isolated treatments provided by her husband plays a great role in her breakdown and her animalistic behaviors exhibited upon her husband’s return.