In everyday day life we go through changes and sometimes we even break down to the point we do not know what to do with ourselves, but in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story” The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is an obsessive person. The story focuses on a woman who is going through postpartum depression and has had a nervous breakdown. Her husband John moves her into a home where he wants her to rest in isolation to recover from her disorder. Throughout her time in the room the narrator discovers new things and finally understands life. 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. The room describes the narrator. The room was once a nursery so it reminds her that she has a baby which she is not able to see or hold. The room was also a playroom so it reminds her once again that she cannot play with or watch her baby play. The room has two windows which she looks out of and sees all the beautiful places she cannot go because of her husband. The bars on the windows represent a prison which her husband has put her in to heal from her illness. Throughout her time in the room she notices the wallpaper “a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (514). After a couple of days in her opinion the wallpaper is starting to change. She sees “a women stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (518). In the daytime she sees the women outside the house “I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grapes arbors, creeping all around the garden“(521). The places where the women is creeping is where the narrator can’t go so she he creeps in the daytime “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight” (520).
The narrator, a new mother, is revoked of her freedom to live a free life and denied the fact that she is “sick”, perhaps with postpartum depression, by her husband, a physician, who believes whatever sorrows she is feeling now will pass over soon. The problematic part of this narrative is that this woman is not only kept isolated in a room she wishes to have nothing to do with, but her creative expression is revoked by her husband as we can see when she writes: “there comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word (Gilman,
To start off, first, the narrator thinks that the house her and her husband John are renting for the next three months is haunted or it wouldn’t be as cheap as it is for being such a beautiful place. Another thing is that she unhappy in her marriage. Her husband doesn’t listen to her, tells her she’s wrong and laughs at her. She is feeling very unwell and all he says is she has temporary nervous depression and only tells her to stay in bed and do nothing. The way she describes things is very bleak, dark, depressing. She keeps going back to thoughts of the house being haunted and gets anxious. She becomes angry with John for no reason sometimes and thinks it’s from her ‘nervous condition’. Something the reader may not catch onto when she talks about how she doesn’t like her bedroom is how she took the nursery, so right away, we know she has a baby. She feels trapped with the barred windows and not being able to go anywhere, having to just lay down and look at the most revolting yellow wallpaper shes ever seen. Writing the story alone makes her extremely exhausted and she says that John doesn’t know the extent of her suffering. Eventually, it’s made known that she can’t even go near her own child and it makes her increasingly nervous. She has unwanted thoughts throughout the entire story of the terrifying ugly yellow
The short story “Yellow Wallpaper, “written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, narrates the story in the first person through parts, as if they were entered as a memoir. She is a woman who is going through a type of paranoiac post-partum depression, after the birth of her child. It can also be observed also a type of bipolar disorder in her. The impact of the classic The “Yellow Wallpaper” is huge, the shock of its truth is unpredictable. Gilman’s suffering suffocates everyone around her. She is locked up in a bedroom, as she describes in one of the passages that she writes, seeing “barred windows for children” and “rings and things on the wall.” Clearly it can be seen
In most narratives there is usually a protagonist, antagonist and plot line in which we follow and either believe the speaker or disagree with them; no matter the case, we form a solid opinion based on the progression of the plot. However, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there is an automatic problem with the plot line of the story. Is it believable and can we trust the speaker? What is the true nature of why the author wrote the story? The point of the plot line is to understand the progression of mental illness, not to read a narrative about moving wallpapers; it isn’t to try and tell whether the woman is stable enough to be trusted with a possible plot line. From the beginning of the short story she claims that she
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
Jane’s husband does not allow her to write because he feels that with her imaginative power and nervous condition it would lead to fancy. “John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies” (Gilman 649) without her outlet of writing Jane begins to see women in the wall-paper creeping around from the inside of the wall-paper to the outside in the gardens. She also feels that the women are trapped behind the first layer of design on the paper as if it was bars keeping them trapped. “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as is she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move.” (Gilman 652) Jane also begins to believe that the wall-paper know what it was doing to her “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (Gilman 653) Jane starts to relate to the women being trapped in the paper and like she is trapped with-in the bedroom. Jane becomes one with the women in the wallpaper and referrers to the women as I. Jane begins creeping along the baseboards trying to release the women from their prison of wall-paper, which will release her from her
She first sees a confusing pattern and as she follows the pattern she sees a woman behind the wallpaper. The narrator describes the woman in the wallpaper as a ‘creeper’ and also admits that she has same habit of creeping as well. “I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines. I don 't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight ! I always lock the door when I creep by daylight” (Stetson 654). Throughout the story, ‘creep’ becomes the narrator’s favored adjective for describing how she feels and how she personifies the woman behind the wallpaper. Apart from creeping the other characteristics of women behind the wallpaper such as being plain, trapped and insane are also very likewise to the characteristics of the narrator. In Freud 's understanding the concept of the ‘double’ is that the self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self (Freud 9). To get away from feeling imprisoned the narrator invented the “creeping women” in her mind and pictured it in the wallpaper to cope with her anxiety and
He isolated her, moved her to a confined room and took away her dairy, which in fact, is what you're not supposed to do with someone with a mental health problem. In the story, Perkins Gilman explores that subject of patriarchy's oppression of women through the symbols of the diary and the wallpaper. John restricts his wife of her social life by imposing the rest cure which prevents her from any creativity. Furthermore, her sanity was taken away from her when John wouldn't let her write in her journal. Writing was a way for her to cope with her mental health but since her husband made all the decisions for her, she was no longer allowed to write. She begins to feel discouraged, expressing that "It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work." (649). In fact, the author uses the wallpaper to portray the narrator's mental degradation. As a result of feeling trapped in the room and in her thoughts, the wallpaper
It is just up to an individual to recognize and do something about it before it is too late. The narrator reached her breaking point at the end of the story, but at that point her condition turned into something more severe than it started out to be. No one should be left alone when going through a tough time in their life. Creating the imagines of the woman in the wallpaper was a desperate attempt for help. Representing how trapped the narrator felt in the room. Not sleeping all night and locking herself in the room to finally do something about the wallpaper the narrator hated so much. By doing this the narrator was not only freeing the woman but also freeing herself from that room. John would finally know the extent of her illness and maybe would pay his wife some attention. At that point it was kind of too late to help, but only time could tell if the damage could be
Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to express her opinions about feminism and originality. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman's psychological disorder, her entire mental state characterized by her encounters with the wallpaper in her room. She incorporates imagery and symbolism to show how confined the narrator is because of her gender and mental illness.
The relationship of the narrator and her husband, John, is one that of the time period. The narrator has no other choice but to be obedient to her husband and the things he asked of her, though that isn’t much at the time, due to the recent birth of a child and the “mental state” of the narrator. Though the house seems to intrigue her to an extent, John has her in a room she doesn’t really like and has her isolated for most everything and everyone. He treats the narrator as though she is a child and dismisses her thoughts and ideas, even of her own health and what may help her get better. He “hardly lets me stir without special direction” (Gilman).
When the author of The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote this story, she brought out the feminism, individuality, and the symbolism that allowed the readers to see and experience what it was like to go through a mental breakdown and how the rest of the world reacts to the person going through it. The story is told as a first-person narrative, the protagonist being an upper-middle-class female, whose
The Yellow Wallpaper is a very astonishing story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that daringly reaches out to explore the mental state of a woman whose mind eventually begins to be broken down to a state of insanity by the appearance of a creeping woman who is trapped behind a revolting yellow wallpaper. This short story takes a look at the causes of the narrator’s insanity by how she was confined in a house alone, trapped with only her mind and a dull wallpaper; while dealing with depression and consuming strong
The narrator has been oppressed and subordinated by the men in her life and the doctor that prescribes the “rest cure” and her husband, John, who advocates this cure. The narrator is not allowed to make any decisions for herself. In fact, when the narrator attempts to stand up for what she wants John immediately curbs her desires and pushes her back into submission. For example, the narrator would like a different room downstairs but “John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another” (p. 843). The narrator is kept from social activities due to her mental state yet John feels the need to remain in close proximity to her. This illustrates John’s need to keep the narrator under his thumb. As the story progresses, the narrator turns her attention more to the yellow wallpaper in the room that she is confined in. The wallpapers with its strangling patterns and bulbous eyes mimic the narrator’s own life. She is constrained and constantly watched over. The narrator starts to see a woman trying to escape from behind the bars in the abhorrent wallpaper. The narrator decides to peel off the yellow wallpaper. Once she succeeds “there are so many of those creeping women and they all creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did” (p. 843). The narrator comes to the
In the final moments of this story, the woman’s husband returns to see her. She writes, “He stopped short by the door. ‘What is the matter?’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing!’ I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ Now why should that man have fainted, but he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!’” This final passage shows that, when this woman rebels, and “escapes the wallpaper”, it is not highly looked upon. The woman made a power statement, by telling her husband that she had, in essence, found a new role in life, and he can not push her back. When he can not handle her actions, she continues her new ways right over him.