Mental Disorders In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1123 Words3 Pages

When you think about different types of mental disorders in the human body what comes to mind? You may think of the most common disorders like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, or maybe obsessive compulsive disorder. For all the mental disorders that people face on a day-to-day basis have some type of treatment to control it. This can either be prescribing the patient with medicine or providing them with therapy. The short story that I would be discussing about is the Yellow Wallpaper. The Yellow Wallpaper was created by an author by the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a Hartford, Connecticut native that was a well-known feminist during the nineteenth century. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman …show more content…

In Chapter 7 of the Backpack Literature book, the literary elements that focuses on in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is symbols. In the literature world, symbols are basically different kind of things like objects, people, or places that have a meaning behind it to get readers to understand what the story or book is trying to explain. This short story caught my attention the most because being a psychology major reading stories about someone that is has a mental disorder or searching for help for their disorder is interesting because I have to know all the different types of mental disorders out there and willing to help patients overcome it. It also has a thriller-feel to the story that makes the story more intriguing. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main situations that were important to me was the difference between the narrator and he husband, the mansion, and the …show more content…

The symbol that is most important is the description of the wallpaper in the couple’s mansion. Based on the narrator’s senses, the wallpaper in the house symbolizes something that tend to bother her directly. That could either be the fact that she feel that her husband is avoiding her and feels like since he is a physician everything he is saying is right or she is really suffering a disorder and trying to finds ways to seek help. Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. The sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. The wallpaper can also symbolize the structure of a family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped in. Towards the end of the story, the narrator is

Open Document