Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And Crime And Punishment

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Recommended: Poverty as a reason for crime

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the novel Crime and Punishment, wallpaper is a heavily used symbol representing many different ideas like poverty, mental degradation and depression, and the Devil. By using wallpaper to symbolize these philosophies and ideas, both authors create an atmosphere of darkness and despair for their characters to survive in. Poverty is a big idea symbolized by wallpaper in both stories. In Crime and Punishment, wallpaper is used in the description of Raskolnikov’s room to portray to the reader the depth of Raskolnikov’s financial situation: It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling. (Dostoevsky 24) The use of wallpaper in this passage paints a picture of a room that is very dirty and unkempt. The fact that the paper is peeling off the walls is a sign of long put-off maintenance. Not only is the paper in tatters, the furniture inside the room is also in shambles: “A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall …show more content…

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman slowly dives into a pool of insanity caused by the hypnotic pattern of the yellow wallpaper: “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes”(Perkins 8). This can be compared to Raskolnikov’s overactive thoughts and strive for loneliness: “He had got completely away from everyone, like a tortoise in its shell, and even the sight of a servant girl…[made] him writhe with nervous irritation”(Dostoevsky 25). For Raskolnikov, being in the presence of the nasty wallpaper also drives him

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  • Setting And Oppression In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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  • The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper

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  • Metamorphosis of Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper and If I Were a Man by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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  • The Power of a Symbol in The Yellow Wallpaper, The Glass Menagerie and The Lottery

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  • Symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper

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  • The Yellow Wallpaper and The Cask Of Amontillado

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  • Diction In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    1360 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

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  • The Meaning of the Wallpaper in The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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    The short story titled, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is given its name for no other reason than the disturbing yellow wallpaper that the narrator comes to hate so much; it also plays as a significant symbol in the story. The wallpaper itself can represent many various ideas and circumstances, and among them, the sense of feeling trapped, the impulse of creativity gone awry, and what was supposed to be a simple distraction transfigures into an unhealthy obsession. By examining the continuous references to the yellow wallpaper itself, one can begin to notice how their frequency develops the plot throughout the course of the story. As well as giving the reader an understanding as to why the wallpaper is a more adequate and appropriate symbol to represent the lady’s confinement and the deterioration of her mental and emotional health. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the color of the wallpaper symbolizes the internal and external conflicts of the narrator that reflect the expectations and treatment of the narrator, as well as represent the sense of being controlled in addition to the feeling of being trapped.

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  • Women and Fiction in The Yellow Wallpaper

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    Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a deceptively simple story.  It is easy to follow the thirteen pages of narrative and conclude the protagonist as insane.  This is a fair judgement, after all no healthy minded individual becomes so caught up with "hideous" and "infuriating" wallpaper to lose sleep over it, much less lock herself in a room to tear the wallpaper down.  To be able to imagine such things as "broken necks" and "bulbous eyes" in the wallpaper is understandable, irrational and erratic designs can form rational patterns in our minds, but to see a woman locked inside of the "bars" of the wallpaper and attempt to rescue her seems altogether crazy.  Her fascination with the wallpaper does seem odd to us, but it easy to focus on the eccentricity of her interest with paper and lose sight of what the wallpaper institutes: her writing.  It is her writing that keeps her sane, the wallpaper that makes her insane, and from these two very symbolic poles the short story rotates.  Gilman's short story is not simply about a lonely woman's descent into madness, but is symbolic of previous and contemporary women writer's attempt to overcome the "madness" and bias of the established, male dominated literary society that surrounds them.

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  • Imagery: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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    The wallpaper, the narrator's obsession, destroyed the peace of mind for all parties concerned. The imagery, used in the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", paints a vivid picture and the reader becomes a front row spectator to the mental deterioration of the narrator to utter insanity.

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  • Realism In The Yellow Wallpaper

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    “The Yellow Wallpaper” is set in the countryside, miles away from the nearest village, in a summer home. Surrounded by hedges, a garden, and servants’ quarters, the setting provides a serene but confined feel to the story. The setting gives off a feel of tranquility but later on is discovered

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  • The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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    The first example of an element of fiction used in The Yellow Wallpaper is symbolism. One symbol is the room. There is are bars on the windows to make the reader feel that the narrator is more than likely staying in psychiatric holding room than a room where she can get over her anxious condition. In most sanitariums, there are bars on the windows. The narrator’s husband went against her wishes to stay in the room downstairs with open windows and a view of the garden and put her in a barred prison cell contributing to the theme freedom and confinement. The second symbol is the bed. The bed is big, chained, and nailed to the floor. The reader could say the bed symbolizes sexual repression because a bed is where it happened during the 1900s and with a bed of such large size being nailed and chained down can represent sexual repression.

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  • Critical Response The Yellow Wallpaper

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    Upon moving in to her home she is captivated, enthralled with the luscious garden, stunning greenhouse and well crafted colonial estate. This was a place she fantasized about, qualifying it as a home in which she seemed comfortable and free. These thoughts don’t last for long, however, when she is prescribed bed rest. She begins to think that the wallpaper, or someone in the wallpaper is watching her making her feel crazy. She finally abandons her positivity towards what now can be considered her husband’s home, and only labels negative features of the home. For example, the narrator rants about the wallpaper being, “the strangest yellow…wallpaper! It makes me think of… foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman). One can only imagine the mental torture that the narrator is experiencing, staring at the lifeless, repulsive yellow hue of ripping

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