Escape Through Dementia in The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" is an excellent story on several levels. It works as a suspenseful thriller about the effects of mental illness. It also serves to make several points about feminism and the pervailing attitudes of her time.
John, the husband, serves as a metaphor for masculine views of the time, and for the masculine side of humans, the side of reason and logic. "John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horor of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures" (1658). His character is almost stereotypical in its adherence to reason and its attittude towards his wife. He negates her intuition; "there is something strange about the house - I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window" (1658) He attributes her condition to "a slight hysterical tendency" (1658), which is, etymologically speaking, just a polite way of saying that she is instable due to being a woman. He is not interested in his wife's actual condition, rather in his diagnosis; "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him" (1659). His best advice is to not use her imagination (though trapped in an ugly room), but to become more reasonable and to resist her condition through willpower. When he does put her to bed and asks her to get well, he asks, not for her own self, but with him as the motivation; "He said [. . .] that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well" (1663).
John is reasonable and educated. He represents a stifling pr...
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...eedom from the bars in the pattern.
This creeping about is certainly at odds with her husband's requests. It is irrational, in that she thinks she has escaped, when it is actually time to leave for good, and she has locked herself in. She defies his orders of bed rest, physically exhausting herself crawling about and pushing the bed and biting the bed and tearing the wall-paper. She overcomes her husband's forthright sensibility by acting so crazy that he cannot deny it, cannot make sense of it, cannot do anything but faint away, leaving her to crawl right over the top of him. She has escaped his oppression by going into her dementia and embracing it.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-paper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eds. Nina Baym, et. al. Shorter 5th ed. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999: 1656-1669.
Rudwick, Elliott. "W. E. B. Du Bois (American Sociologist and Social Reformer)." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.
Moliere, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. "Tartuffe." The Norton Anthology Western Literature. 8th ed. Eds. Sarah Lawall et al. Vol 2. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. 19-67. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 1684-1695.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories. 4th ed. ed. James H. Pickering. New York: MacMillan, 1985. 426-34.
Through the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the main character is driven into a state of madness as a result of isolation. The narrator explains that she is suffering from a slight nervous depression, leaving her husband to treat her with rest. She and her husband moved to a house in the country house expecting improvement. During this time, she is placed in a solitary room with walls covered in yellow wallpaper against her will. The excessive abundance of social isolation that this character experiences brings her to an inevitable mental breakdown.
Even though her husband treats her with what seem at first as love, it becomes clear she is nothing more to him than a piece of property. Every time he talks to her, he asks her to get better for his sake and the children's, and only after mentions hers interests. He doesn't think that she has any normal human feelings or worries and attributes her behavior to minor nervous depression. He doesn't see her true suffering since he believes "there is no reason to suffer" (574). He could never understand that a woman can be unsatisfied with the role imposed on her by society. Even though the heroine recognizes that her condition is caused by something other than John's theory, she is too scared to voice her opinion.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" Ed. Catherine Lavender; The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, Fall Semester, Oct. 1997. (25 Jan 1999) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
At this day in age we are constantly trying to improve the field of medicine in any way that we possibly can. We cherish every birthday and continually try to prolong life. Not only through every field of medicine, especially in terms of cancer. The American Cancer Society is “the official sponsor of birthdays” and is making leaps and bounds in the types of care that cancer patients receive. One of these many breakthroughs is the practice of Stereotactic (Body) Radiotherapy or S(B)RT. SBRT and other radiation therapies have the ability to greatly improve the way that we treat the issue of cancer and the variation of treatment options; however, they have raised the concerns of long term effects from radiation and cost-effectiveness. As research has begun to show, radiation therapies are having great success in curing cancer.
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"Miller Center." American President: Theodore Roosevelt: Domestic Affairs. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Jan. 2014. .
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. 354-65. Print.
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"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"—Writing Women." EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web. Web. 05 Mar. 2011.
Cossou, E. (2010 ). Lagos aims to be Africa's model megacity.Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8473001.stm. Last accessed 18th January 2014.