Written in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that explores the mind of a woman who is driven to insanity by her surrounding environment. This woman, who narrates her experiences in a journal, begins by marveling at the grandeur of the estate her husband has taken for their summer vacation. Her feeling that there is “something queer” (307) about the situation leads her into a discussion of her illness. The narrator describes that she is suffering from “nervous depression” (308) and of her marriage. She confesses that her husband John, who is additionally her doctor, belittles both her illness and her overall concerns. John contrasts the narrator’s creative, thoughtfulness with his pragmatic and analytical …show more content…
By taking both of these elements of the narrative, it becomes unclear to decipher what it was specifically that drove the narrator to insanity. While it would be nice to say that either John or the wallpaper directly drove the narrator to insanity, the reality is that an answer that simple does not address the question in any meaningful way. Rather, the answer needs to be one that identifies in what ways and reasons the narrator’s surrounding environment has contributed towards her …show more content…
It is easy to see that there is an inherent relationship between the way John treats his wife and the effect the yellow wallpaper has on the narrator. While John certainly means no harm, his stubbornness to let the narrator have decision in her life leads her to become more depressed. As she becomes more depressed, the patterns she sees on the yellow wallpaper become more lively until she sees images of a trapped woman behind the wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper in this sense acts as a catalyst to the narrator’s mental demise. While both John and the yellow wallpaper made significant impacts on the narrator’s mental state, they were both interdependent for her eventual mental breakdown. Without her husband, the narrator’s experiences with the yellow wallpaper would not have a significant enough context of depression associated with them. Without the yellow wallpaper, there would have been no woman behind the wallpaper to ultimately cause the narrator to break down, even with the context of depression. But with viewing the wallpaper with the context of severe depression, the circumstances brought on the narrator enable her to mentally
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman’s gradual descent into insanity, after the birth of her child. The story was written in 1892 after the author herself suffered from a nervous breakdown, soon after the birth of her daughter in 1885. Gilman did spend a month in a sanitarium with the urging of her physician husband. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story about herself, during the timeframe of when Gilman was in the asylum.
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
The “Yellow Wall Paper “ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression.
The first theme present in the horrific and heart wrenching story is the subordinate position of women within marriage. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator’s wish that her house were haunted like those in which “frightened heroines suffer Gothic horrors” (DeLamotte 5). However, this wish is in essence to empower herself. The narrator is already afraid of her husband and is suffering mentally and emotionally. She desperately wishes for an escape “through fantasy, into a symbolic version of her own plight: a version in which she would have a measure of distance and control” (DeLamotte 6). Throughout the text, Gilman reveals to the reader that during the time in which the story was written, men acquired the working role while women were accustomed to working within the boundaries of their “woman sphere”. This gender division meritoriously kept women in a childlike state of obliviousness and prevented them from reaching any scholastic or professional goals. John, the narrator’s husband, establishes a treatment for his wife through the assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity. This narrow minded thinking leads him to patronize and control his wife, all in the name of “helping her”. The narrator soon begins to feel suffocated as she is “physically and emotionally trapped by her husband” (Korb). The narrator has zero control in the smallest details of her life and is consequently forced to retreat into her fantasies...
The narrator then truly drops into the realm of insanity. She starts to be untrusting of John, stating, “He asked me all sorts of questions too, pretending to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him” (235). Her distrust reveals that her mind has truly discovered how oppressed she is. She then viciously begins ripping the wallpaper from the wall (236).
The Yellow Wallpaper is a popular book when discussing psychology in the late nineteenth century. The author, Charlotte Gilman, wrote her experience of mental illness through her narrator. Gilman suffered with depression after giving birth and she never fully recovered from it. (Gilman 95). The narrator is depicted as a woman who has been diagnosed with what was called a nervous disorder. Her husband, a psychologist, gave her several different tonics and other substances that are supposed to make her better. She was also put on bed rest meaning that she was not able to work or do anything that would tire her out. She is told to go and rest several times during the story and it is evident that her ‘psychosis’ gets worse when she is forced to stay in her room and rest for the majority of her days and all night. She begins to see women in the pattern of her wallpaper and she becomes obsessed with it. The narrator becomes very protective of her wallpaper and gets almost jealous when she sees her sister-in-law looking at it and touching it. She even says “no person touches this pa...
In seeing the story through the wife's eyes, we can see that her mental illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is inevitable. Between society's view of women at that time, the husband's attitude towards her, and his ineffective remedies, the wife's mental instability can only grow worse. The wallpaper lets the reader follow the woman's regression into insanity as the story progresses. Only with the first person point of view (the wife's) can the reader follow this regression of the mind. All in all, this is a sad story of a woman's struggle for sanity in an indifferent society.
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 narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression. " In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells her readers the story of a woman desperate to be free. Gilman’s use of symbolism is nothing short of brilliant in telling the story of a new mother suffering from postpartum depression and fighting her way through societies ideas of what a woman should be. When her husband, John, also known as her physician, tells her nothing is wrong with her mind, at first she believes him because she knows that society tells her she should. However, with her husband’s misdiagnosis, or attempt to keep his wife sane for the sake of their reputation, comes a short journey into madness for his wife, Jane. Jane’s downward spiral, as one may call it, turns out to be not so downward when the reader
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in the first person narrative of a women's secret journal and her descent into madness. With the medical community of the nineteenth century misunderstanding and mistreating women, despite the protests of women. The treatment that John, the narrator’s husband, offers does not help at all, in fact throughout the story the narrator’s journal entrees and condition progressively worsens. Spending the summer in an abandoned mansion in order to recover from what her physician husband believes is a “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” (648). Her husband does not believe that her illness is serious the narrator states,“You see he does not believe I am sick” (647)! According to history men thought that they knew better than women, especially women who were “hysterical.” ...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a woman who is trapped in a room covered in yellow wallpaper. The story is one that is perplexing in that the narrator is arguably both the protagonist as well as the antagonist. In the story, the woman, who is the main character, struggles with herself indirectly which results in her descent into madness. The main conflicts transpires between the narrator and her husband John who uses his power as a highly recognize male physician to control his wife by placing limitations on her, forcing her to behave as a sick woman. Hence he forced himself as the superior in their marriage and relationship being the sole decision make. Therefore it can be said what occurred externally resulted in the central conflict of” “The Yellow Wallpaper being internal. The narrator uses the wallpaper as a symbol of authenticy. Hence she internalizes her frustrations rather then openly discussing them.
The Yellow Wallpaper, Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is comprised as an assortment of journal entries written in first person, by a woman who has been confined to a room by her physician husband who he believes suffers a temporary nervous depression, when she is actually suffering from postpartum depression. He prescribes her a “rest cure”. The woman remains anonymous throughout the story. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in the room, and engages in some outrageous imaginations towards the wallpaper. Gilman’s story depicts women’s struggle of independence and individuality at the rise of feminism, as well as a reflection of her own life and experiences.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story told from the first person point of view of a doctor's wife who has nervous condition. The first person standpoint gives the reader access only to the woman’s thoughts, and thus, is limited. The limited viewpoint of this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the wife feels throughout the story. The point of view is also limited in that the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no benefit of hindsight, and is never able to actually see that the men in her life are part of the reason she never gets well. This paper will discuss how Gilman’s choice of point of view helps communicate the central theme of the story- that women of the time were viewed as being subordinate to men. Also, the paper will discuss how ignoring oneself and one’s desires is self-destructive, as seen throughout the story as the woman’s condition worsens while she is in isolation, in the room with the yellow wallpaper, and her at the same time as her thoughts are being oppressed by her husband and brother.
In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author takes the reader through the terrors of a woman’s psychosis. The story convey to understatements pertaining to feminism and individuality that at the time was only idealized. Gillman illustrates her chronological descent into insanity. The narrators husband John, who is also her physician diagnosed her with “nervous depression” and therefore ordered her to isolate until she recuperates. She is not only deprived of outside contact but also of her passion to write, since it could deteriorate her condition. The central conflict of the story is person versus society; the healthy part of her, in touch with herself clashing with her internalized thoughts of her society’s expectations. In a feminist point of view the central idea pertains to the social confinement that woman undergo due to their society.