Isolation In The Yellow Wallpaper

1614 Words4 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper The story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ is one of intrigue and wonder. The story was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it happens to be the story under analytical scrutiny, hence the title as well as the first sentence. The characters in the story consist of the narrator, Jennie, the wet nurse, the narrator's husband John, and the women in the wallpaper. In the story, the narrator and her husband, as well as her newly born daughter and the nanny for the daughter, take a summer trip to a house away from the city. The husband and brother of the narrator are physicians, and neither believe that she is sick, they say “there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency...”
For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time... But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations.” (Bond, Michael; How extreme isolation warps the mind) It was not immediately that the narrator started seeing the women in the yellow wallpaper, nor that her sleeping patterns were changed but more precisely, it was after being in the house after a time had gone by. An experiment was conducted “at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal, led by the psychologist Donald Hebb.” (Bond, Michael; How extreme isolation warps the mind) They had invited and paid people to be their guinea pigs, so to say, in the research. The paid people were isolated for only a few days or a week and after only a few hours of being isolated they started to crave human interaction. “When they emerged from the experiment they found it hard to shake this altered sense of reality,” Similarly, the narrator had an altered sense of reality and she came to thinking that she had come from the wallpaper of which she thought was changing constantly. They people involved in the experiment were “convinced that the whole room was in motion, or that objects were constantly changing shape and size.” (Bond, Michael; How extreme isolation warps the mind) The narrator was sure that the wallpaper was changing shape and size as well. The participants were not isolated for very long and those were the results. Similarly, the same threats of results could pose for the narrator because she did exhibit some of these

Open Document