Just like everything on this earth, nature, situations, and people, we are all moved by a trigger. That trigger, mathematically speaking can be referred as the independent variable. The independent variable impacts and has the power to change the dependent variable. In the story of The Yellow Wallpaper, several apparent triggers were illustrated in the story, which made it difficult to understand who was the real opponent in the story. But after analyzing the innermost thoughts of the narrator, the main opponent did not necessarily play the bad guy in the plot, but the fact that he held the remote control to turn the situation from bad to good and from good to bad made him the main opponent in the story. In this case, John is the one holding …show more content…
In the story the narrator expresses numerous times the way she feels during her condition and the only response that we get from John is, “There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”(652). John simply refuses to put himself in her wife’s shoes and share at least a small portion of what she is feeling. Also, we see in the story how the narrator feels to this lack of empathy coming from her own husband. In page 649 she says, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” John’s lack of empathy does not let him analyze and access what is going on in the mind of her wife. Instead, the narrator is suffering while John is walking around with the idea that there is no reason for her to suffer. Lastly, the narrator shares how she feels to the idea of wanting to tell John about the haunting wallpaper when she says, “I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper- he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away”(653). When the narrator gets to the point of not wanting to share something with her husband because he will make fun of her, that just shows no empathy whatsoever. Empathy is the understanding and the exchange of feelings with someone else. At …show more content…
John, the husband of the narrator, believes based on his professional knowledge that it is better for her to stay in a room until she makes a sense of improvement. The authoritative role that John plays in the story makes him the independent variable due to his actions of manipulation, lack of empathy, and absence of concern over what her wife needs to say. Even though the narrator wants to be heard, she remains with a submissive attitude throughout the story making her the dependent variable by leaving her entire illness inside John’s hands[responsibility]. John at this point has the power to take her condition to a total different direction but instead decides to ignore what she has to say and completely rely on his assumptions, which evidently lead to a tragic
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
By closing her off from the rest of the world, he is taking her away from things that important to her mental state; such as her ability to read and write, her need for human interaction, her need to make her own decisions. All of these are important to all people. This idea of forced rest and relaxation to cure temporary nervous problems was very common at the time. Many doctors prescribed it for their female patients. The narrators husband, brother, and their colleagues all feel that this is the correct way to fix her problem, which is practically nonexistent in their eyes. Throughout the beginning of the story, the narrator tends to buy into the idea that the man is always right and makes excuses for her feelings and his actions and words: "It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise and because he loves me so," (23).
Perkins stated that she wrote the story after a period of being interred for mental illness, and that she was only able to recover from this illness after having ignored her doctor's advice: “Using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again…ultimately recovering some measure of power.” (Perkins, 2009. 300) From the start of the story, Perkins describes an uneven relationship between her narrator and her husband. The latter is a person of standing and has a respectable social position. He is therefore put in a position of authority. This is made clear in the lines: “ You see he does not believe I am sick!...If a physician of high standing...assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?” (Perkins, 2013. 76) From the start of the story, Perkins puts her narrator in a position in which she is surrounded by male authority figures who deny...
Ostensibly, the narrator's illness is not physiological, but mental. John concludes that his wife is well except for a "temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis that is confirmed by the narrator's own physician-brother (Gilman 10). John's profession, and moreover his diagnosis, is a license to closely observe, scrutinize, watch, gaze upon, seek out, and investigate his wife and her ailments, which consequently permits him to deploy seemingly inexhaustible (medical, scientific) means for (re)formulating and (re)presenting the hysteric female--not only for the purpose of giving her discursive representation, but in order to "de-mystify" her mystery and reassure himself that she is, finally, calculable, harmless, and non-threatening. To speak of John in psychoanalytic terms, his preoccupation with his wife, her body, and her confinement, reveals unspoken anxieties: the fear of castration and the "lack" the female body represents.
However, the reader must always keep in mind the time at which this piece was written and how these relationships exemplify the realities of personal relationships during this time era. Her relationship with John is dominated by him and is almost like she is the child. Without anyone to speak to about her true feelings and stresses, she writes, another thing she must hide from John and Jennie. The reader feels a sense of fear from the narrator, “there comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 78). Yet another sign of how he does not want his wife thinking for herself and doing what she pleases. When learning about the author and her background, her feminist side shows in this piece through examples like these. The true dark sides of marriage, the loneliness, and the female role of always being superior are portrayed perfectly in this short
To begin with, the narrator husband name is John, who shows male dominance early in the story as he picked the house they stayed in and the room he kept his wife in, even though his wife felt uneasy about the house. He is also her doctor and orders her to do nothing but rest; thinking she is just fine. John is the antagonist because he is trying to control
She attempts to look better, for the sake of her husband, her conscious mind wants to be better to get out of that place. Her unconscious mind is beginning to connect the wallpaper with a mental trap. In the middle of the story the journal entry shows how the narrator sees herself like the house. Outside looks calm and beautiful inside there is chaos like the wallpaper in the dreaded room. Her thoughts are becoming more chaotic just like the wallpaper. There is no challenge in her live she is just supposed to rest and heal, but she spends the time contemplating the wallpaper. Looking at it day in and day out is unconsciously getting into her thoughts and bringing the chaos out into her consciousness. The narrator is confused because she believes that her husband loves her, but, he is controlling her in ways that she believes not to be helpful. She wants to do more with her life and thinks that the activity will help her feel better. There is a big discrepancy between what John believes and what the narrator believes. He wants her to rest, she wants to be active. He says it is all because he loves her but, she is not listened to and wants to make changes. . She is trying to follow the rules and be the person that her husband, John wants her to be. She consciously sees that she seems to give into the id more and more. The narrator wants her superego to be dominate so her actions don’t show her internal chaos. because she does not want to go to a doctor. The couple are still at odds when she admits to feeling worse and John insist she is doing better and belittles her. The doctor named in the text, Weir Mitchel, is a doctor that Gilman was treated by in real life. She has stated that she wanted to change the way he practiced medicine (Placeholder1). The story shows the chaos in the narrator’s
John did not believe that the narrator was actually suffering from an illness as it was believed that she was seeking attention. Many women in this time period when suffering from Post-Partum Depression were thought of to be attention seeking rather than ill due to the fact that it was a mental illness which is not visible. This led to the narrator only having her journal to confide in regarding her depression. As her illness progresses her journal entries become more illogical and scattered. They begin as logical and chronological accounts of her feelings and daily activities but quickly become illogical. The narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room and often notes that she sees other women in the wallpaper. Phrases such as, “But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.”, and, “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”, become frequent statements made by the narrator in her journal regarding her obsession over the pattern of the wallpaper. As time passes, the images become clearer in her mind and translate into her journal entries, this represents the progression of her illness. Eventually, she reaches her breaking point and has a complete mental breakdown. It can be argued that had the narrator been treated as an intelligent human being and been allowed to express herself outside of her journal, her illness would not have led to a mental
The Victorians thought that their woman should be motherly and uninterested in sex. Women were supposed to be pure and virginal, and even after marriage, they should still be uninterested in sex. The bed is nailed to the floor, which is a metaphor for the culture of male dominance at the time. The narrator's husband, John, is a very successful physician. He tells the narrator time and time again that she is sick. He can be viewed as a very controlling man in which everything must happen his way or not at all. John was a metaphor for the type of society in the 19th century. He is the image of a male-dominated culture where every woman and child had to follow the rules without complaint. The narrator is like a child taking order for the male doctors in her life, even going on to say, “personally, I disagree with their ideas.” She does not accept their diagnosis but has no other choice but to follow it’s harsh procedures, much like the woman of the 19th century. The wallpaper, rules, and opinions of other stood between the narrator’s imagination and intellectual desires, eventually driving her to insanity. However, she is not the only woman in the story to feel this snared feeling. John’s sister, Jennie, claimed that she wouldn't mind tearing the wallpaper apart herself, proving she also felt oppressed by the strict rules of society. The narrator finds
...ssion and intrusiveness. John’s lack of having an open mind to his wife’s thoughts and opinions and his constant childish like treatment of his wife somehow emphasizes this point, although, this may not have been his intention. The narrator felt strongly that her thoughts and feelings were being disregarded and ignored as stated by the narrator “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman 115), and she shows her despise of her husband giving extra care to what he considers more important cases over his wife’s case with a sarcastic notion “I am glad my case is not serious!” (Gilman 115). It is very doubtful that John is the villain of the story, his good intentions towards doing everything practical and possible to help his wife gain her strength and wellbeing is clear throughout the story.
Her husband, John, keeping her away from others because of her nervous condition is one cause of her feeling trapped
The narrator introduces the character John as an authoritative figure, in that he is both her husband and her physician, which makes for a bad combination. His treatment of her so called a “ temporary nervous depression” is an underlining subdues to control her. John believes his methods of treatment are so sure work that he has on her on a set schedule. Gillman writes “So I take phosphates or phosphites ---whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. His treat of her condition is that of a child as if say the she is not capable of taking care of one’s...
Women have struggled for decades to carve out their place in society, but before they could do that they were tasked with standing their ground in their own marriages. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a journalist, feminist and women’s rights activist who used her writing to shed light on women’s unequal status in the institution of marriage. In Gilman’s time it was a social norm that women were concerned only with the domestic trappings of the marriage, while the husband took the active role. In Gilman’s most famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman uses a captivating plot, the symbolism of some frustrating wallpaper, and an overall theme of the importance of self expression to articulate the sometimes harmful aspects of a woman’s place
As the story begins, the narrator tells of how she and her husband, John, are moving into an ancestral summer home. She describes it as a grand and beautiful home but also says she has a weird feeling about it. She then says she has a “nervous depression” and her husband, who is a doctor, will not take her seriously. This is the first hint of her having a troubled life and in the 1890’s, no one understood mental illness, much less knew how to treat it. The social norms of these times allowed her husband to be a domineering figure, therefore she has almost no control over her situation. He seems to make all of the decisions for her and makes her feel belittled and irritated. Being her physician gives him the ability and power to tell her that nothing is wrong with her, and he basically does not take her seriously, which only makes her mental health get worse.
John, the narrator's husband, represents society at large. Like society, John controls and determines much of what his wife should or should not do, leaving his wife incapable of making her own decisions. John's domineering nature can be accredited to the fact that John is male and also a "physician of high standing" (1). John is "practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of thi...