Oftentimes in our lives, we put ourselves in situations and conditions that at one time might have seemed like everything that we ever wanted. Then, after living that way for an extended period of time, we discover that our perception of the situation might have been a bit off. It is no longer the life that we want, but an undesirable fate that we wish to escape from. Sometimes the escape is as simple as a lifestyle change or moving to a new area. Other times it is not so simple, meaning that physical escape is not possible because of the circumstances surrounding the issue at hand. As we can see in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator has placed herself in an inescapable situation, though she did not know it would …show more content…
Her windows are barred, the door is locked, and there is even a locked gate at the top of the stairs. While this much is obvious, in my opinion, there is another prison that she is trapped in: her own mind. She is unable to overcome her own seriously disturbed mind. It started out as depression and kept growing until she eventually lost her sanity and her sense of reality. She tried to escape this prison through the writings in her journal but in truth, this just progressed her mental …show more content…
She starts seeing trapped women dancing around in the wallpaper of her room. Then she starts crawling or “creeping” (according to her words) around the room, running her hand in a line just above the base of the wall, until she finally wears a crease in the wall from doing this all the time. Not only does she do this, but she also tears off almost all of the wallpaper in the room. When John comes into the room and sees this, she says “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” So it turns out, she did escape but she had to go completely insane and forget who she is to do so. She escaped from her own mind, which obviously is not a good thing anyways, but more importantly she is still trapped in the room with the yellow wallpaper. Being unable to think rationally, she will continue to “creep” down that wall until she either chooses to stop or until she is no longer physically capable of doing
Although, for her, she has nothing more to focus on she trusts her imagination to pass the time. Over time she becomes more and more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper, which leaves her in shock. “The wallpaper becomes a projection screen of the narrator growing fright.” (Berman, p.47) This means that the narrator goes to herself on the wall. The isolated woman in the yellow paper is her own reflection. Something that the narrator still does not realize, she only feels the need to release the woman trapped in the wall. She refers to her room as a prison continuously. As she begins to feel isolated she projects her feelings on the yellow wallpaper, but the idea that the room is her prison goes from figurative to reality as insulation deepens her need to escape in some way. “Every time the narrator speaks, she is interrupted and contradicted until she begins to interrupt and contradict herself.” (Berman, p.55) She has her own plan for recovery. But unfortunately, her husband does not listen. For him, the only
Nevertheless, her attempts are futile as he dismisses her once more, putting his supposed medical opinion above his wife’s feelings. The story takes a shocking turn as she finally discerns what that figure is: a woman. As the story progresses, she believes the sole reason for her recovery is the wallpaper. She tells no one of this because she foresees they may be incredulous, so she again feels the need to repress her thoughts and feelings. On the last night of their stay, she is determined to free the woman trapped behind bars.
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.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Story of an Hour" are two very similar stories. Both deal with middle-aged women who long to attain their freedom. They share the same theme, but convey the message differently in terms of style and quality. The two stories are about women who are fighting for freedom, happiness, and the ability to be truly expressive in any way possible.
differently. "John is a physician, and perhaps- (I would not say it to a living
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is partly autobiographical and it illustrates the fight for selfhood by a women in an oppressed and oppressive environment. In the story, the narrator is not allowed to write or think, basically becoming more dysfunctional as she is entrapped in a former nursery room where bars adorn the windows and the bed is nailed to the floor. In this story there is an obstinacy on behalf of the narrator as she tries to go around her husband's and physician's restrictions, however, there is no resisting the oppressive nature of her environment and she finally surrenders to madness even though it represents some kind of selfhood and resistance because it allows her to escape her oppression, "She obsesses about the yellow wallpaper, in which she sees frightful patterns and an imprisoned female figure trying to emerge. The narrator finally escapes from her controlling husband and the intolerable confines of her existence by a final descent into insanity as she peels the wallpaper off and bars her husband from the room" (Gilman, 1999, 1).
Everyone who was once present in the house has now disappeared and Jane is left to cope by herself. All she has left is her bed and her own thoughts. The idea of her trapped will not cure her “sickness” or depression that she is fighting. Jane is
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story that follows part of the life of a woman in the 1800 's in a diary-like format. The story follows a woman who has moved into a house while waiting for the previous one to be remodeled. She has just had a baby that she is not allowed to see, and her husband continues to keep her locked in a room unless she has an escort. In this era women were seen as delicate objects that were prone to intense emotion and in need of constant control by their husbands the escorts and ability to lock her away were, at that time, deemed appropriate ways to deal with his wife’s depression after birth. Strangely the wife was not forced to run the house, but the husband had his sister come and do this as well as take care
As man developed more complex social systems, society placed more emphasis of childbearing. Over time, motherhood was raised to the status of “saintly”. This was certainly true in western cultures during the late 19th/early 20th century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not agree with the image of motherhood that society proposed to its members at the time. “Arguably ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ reveals women’s frustration in a culture that seemingly glorifies motherhood while it actually relegates women to nursery-prisons” (Bauer 65). Among the many other social commentaries contained within this story, is the symbolic use of the nursery as a prison for the main character.
MacPike, Loralee. "Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg, vol. 201, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com.gmclibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=mill30389&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CH1420082948&asid=562f132388d74c4bd92439b5842a2fe7. Accessed 25 Oct. 2017.
Obviously, it is impossible to maintain a healthy mental state in the oppressive environment surrounding the woman. Throughout the story, the author traces the woman's mental deterioration from a having a normal but weakened sense of self, to a complete inversion of her ego. She slowly inverts her orientation of her place in society, turning away from society completely in order to create a world where she can act on her own volition. In order to represent the stages of her gradually worsening state of mind, the author represents the woman's struggles through a parallel with her view of the wallpaper. The wallpaper is at first a seeming inversion of the woman's mind, but it is gradu...
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.
They both feel trapped within their own lives, emotionally and physically. She saw the woman in the wallpaper as a companion in her days of isolation and self-meditation, and she realized that she needed to break free of her husband’s expectations and live her life her desired way. This gave readers insight to the emotional tendencies of the main character and motivations from discovering the meaning of the intricate wallpaper design. This is achieved when she states, “I’ve got out at last in spite of you and Jane. I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
The narrator first describes the wallpaper as “repellent, almost revolting” but she cannot ignore it. Her attraction to the yellow wallpaper grows as she attempts to figure out its pattern. She keeps looking at the yellow wallpaper and determines that the pattern is a woman trapped within the wallpaper, “shaking [the bars] hard”, trying to escape (542). This ultimately leads to the climatic ending with the narrator ripping the wallpaper apart, crawling on the floor alongside the rooms’ walls, and completely “losing it”. 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.
In the short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator chooses to write about a married woman in a new home who ultimately falls down into a spiral of insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper centers primarily on the narrator and her discovery in the room she must stay in to rest. There she sees a yellow wallpaper that soon begins to take the form of a woman who is trapped, and is shaking the wallpaper in order to get out. The narrator continues trying to figure out the wallpaper and its pattern until eventually deciding to rip the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the creeping woman trapped inside. Thus, the narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper suffers a mental collapse by going insane in her attempt to understand the wallpaper which can be attributed