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HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS DURING THE LATE 19TH CENTURY
the yellow wallpaper partirachy
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The story of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins is one of the most famous accounts of madness in 19th century literature; taking the form of a woman’s journal who is receiving treatment for mental illness. Through the journal, she records her experiences and her mental life as she descends into what appears to be complete madness. Perkins is keen to stress both the singular experience of mental illness and ways in which this condition is manipulated and exacerbated by those around her. I will make the argument that it is possible to see the story as possessing a critical attitude towards contemporary social and gender relations in regards to Perkins view of androcentrism.
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...
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... for her treatment will seek to assert their own opinions with greater and more direct force.
In conclusion, 'Yellow Wallpaper' presents a situation in which its narrator is subject to rationalist logic which is not her own and is incapable of responding to her needs. The result of this is the exacerbation of her madness as she projects the life which is absent from her social relations onto inanimate objects around her. Throughout this, her husband and friends stand as both reactions to and causes of this behaviour.
Works Cited
Perkins, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper” Literature: A Portable Anthology. Eds. Janet E. Gardner, Beverly Lawn, Jack Ridl and Peter Schakel. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2013. 76-89. Print.
- “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2009. 331-332. Print.
“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.” ...
There are various interpretations of what causes the narrator to go crazy in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These interpretations include suggestions that the narrator is possessed, that she is oppressed by society and is acting out, that she has suffered from a traumatic childbirth, and so on. While all of these ideas hold merit and are supported by evidence in the short story, there is an alternative explanation that fits the story just as well, if not better. That explanation is that the reason the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” acts strangely and sees images in the wallpaper of her room is that she is suffering from the disorder of postpartum psychosis. During this essay I will be going into depth on a psychological analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s bodies of work, Gilman highlights scenarios exploring traditional interrelations between man and woman while subtexting the necessity for a reevaluation of the paradigms governing these relations. In both of Gilman’s short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Turned”, women are victimized, subjected and mistreated. Men controlled and enslaved their wives because they saw them as their property. A marriage was male-dominated and women’s lives were dedicated to welfare of home and family in perseverance of social stability. Women are expected to always be cheerful and good-humored. Respectively, the narrator and Mrs. Marroner are subjugated by their husbands in a society in which a relationship dominated by the male is expected.
Due to my further analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” beyond the theme of madness, I was able to clearly and thoroughly madness even more. One of the things that allowed me to understand how madness was presented in the story was how the narrator was led into madness. To get to this, I had to look at some of the other things in the story. For example, the narrator decent into madness was very much connected to how gender was presented. During the Victorian era women faced many challenges which included gender inequality. In the short story, the narrator was physically and mentally drained of living the life of the dutiful housewife. Because of her condition, her husband, a physician, saw it fit to confine her to a room taking away any form of creativity from her by banning her to write. “I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to...
Although both protagonists in the stories go through a psychological disorder that turns their lives upside down, they find ways to feel content once again. In Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, damp room covered in musty wallpaper all play important roles in driving the wife insane. Gilman's masterful use of not only the setting, both time and place, but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to process the woman's growing insanity. The narrator develops a very intimate relationship with the yellow wallpaper throughout the story, as it is her constant companion. Her initial reaction to it is a feeling of hatred; she dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but does not attribute anything peculiar to it. Two weeks into their stay she begins to project a sort of personality onto the paper, so she studies the pattern more closely, noticing for the first time “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman). At this point, her madness is vague, but becoming more defined, because although the figure that she sees behind the pattern has no solid shape, she dwells on it and
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature 's Ancestral House: Another Look At 'The Yellow Wallpaper '." Women 's Studies 12.2 (1986): 113. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
MacPike, Loralee. "Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg, vol. 201, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com.gmclibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=mill30389&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CH1420082948&asid=562f132388d74c4bd92439b5842a2fe7. Accessed 25 Oct. 2017.
Lacking any mode of self-expression, except for the few times she can sneak writing into her journal, the narrator looks for something to occupy her mind and the yellow wallpaper is the answer. Gilman points out the fault of psychiatrists at the time. Even though doctors believe that starving the mentally ill of any sort of stimulus is a cure of mental health issues, Gilman illustrates that this only creates an environment for even further deterioration of the mind. Instead, what the narrator initially suggests to her husband is right. Allowing those who suffer from mental health issues to express themselves and explore what’s out there is the real cure.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman explores the oppression of women in the nineteenth century and the constant limitation of their freedom, which many times led to their confinement. The short story illustrates male superiority and the restriction of a woman’s choice regarding her own life. The author’s diction created a horrific and creepy tone to illustrate the supernatural elements that serve as metaphors to disguise the true meaning of the story. Through the use of imagery, the reader can see that the narrator is living within a social class, so even though the author is trying to create a universal voice for all women that have been similar situations, it is not possible. This is not possible because there are many
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has fabricated that includes a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator of this story grows obsessed with the wallpaper in her room because her husband minimizes her exposure to the outside world and maximizes her rest. Academic essayists such as Susan M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter have a feminist reading of the story, however, this is not the most important reading. The author experienced the turmoil of the rest cure personally, which means that the story is most likely a comment on the great mistreatment of depression, hysteria and mental disorders in general. Despite the claims of Gilbert, Gubar, and Showalter that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is solely feminist propaganda, their analysis is often unnecessarily deep and their claims are often unwarranted, resulting in an inaccurate description of a story that is most importantly about the general mistreatment of psychosis and the descent into insanity regardless of gender.
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
In literature, women are often depicted as weak, compliant, and inferior to men. The nineteenth century was a time period where women were repressed and controlled by their husband and other male figures. Charlotte Gilman, wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper," showing her disagreement with the limitations that society placed on women during the nineteenth century. According to Edsitement, the story is based on an event in Gilman’s life. Gilman suffered from depression, and she went to see a physician name, Silas Weir Mitchell. He prescribed the rest cure, which then drove her into insanity. She then rebelled against his advice, and moved to California to continue writing. She then wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is inflated version of her experience. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the main character is going through depression and she is being oppressed by her husband and she represents the oppression that many women in society face. Gilman illustrates this effect through the use of symbols such as the yellow wallpaper, the nursery room, and the barred windows.
...Mitchell, seems all the more plausible. After all, her socially-defined role as the dutiful wife and mother was being constrained by her inability to withstand the treatment foisted upon her by a man trained to disregard his patients' feelings. As a woman, she had no socially sanctioned way to respond to the problems she faced. Rather than wonder, as John does throughout the story, why his wife is becoming increasingly deranged, readers of this story should only wonder why, given the mores of the time period, there weren't far more stories like it.
The narrator is ordered by her husband, who is serving as her physician as well, that she is “absolutely forbidden to work” and instead get “perfect rest,” and “all the air” the narrator can get (Gilman, 549). The narrator is confined to spend her time in a room which is playing tricks on her mind until she can no longer identify reality from her imagination. Another cause of the narrator’s loneliness is her husband’s rare presence at home due to his work as a physician, “away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious,” leaving the narrator with his sister, who even then also leaves the narrator alone most of the time (Gilman, 550). The narrator falls into a state of insanity because she hardly had anyone with her to normally interact with. The only interaction she did have was that of the yellow wallpaper which constantly plagued her mind.
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.