Isolation In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall

What is it truly like to be alone? Is being alone good for you? Does it have benefits? People need to have a face to face interaction daily in order for our brains to stay in shape. We need to have someone to talk to to keep our brains thinking about what they are saying and what we are going to say back. Without that, our mind shuts down and goes to “another world”. Isolation affects many people nation wide. Being isolated has negative health effects, such as hallucinations and high levels of stress.

In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a woman has hallucinations and sees a woman in the wall. In the story, she is put in an upstairs bedroom of a house in the middle of nowhere. The walls were yellow, along with a strange design that she could see move as the sun shone on it through the day. After a few days of staying in the yellow room, she is trying to go to sleep and is awakened by a woman trapped in the wall. The woman in the wall kept screaming

A study by Donald O. Hebb, a professor of psychology at Montreal’s McGill University, shows that people in solitary confinement can not pass grade school tasks, such as arithmetic, word association, and pattern recognition. They also suffered mentally and had hallucinations. They put gloves on their hands, cardboard over their arms, and put a u shaped pillow behind their head to make them feel as comfortable as possible while limiting their sensory feelings. One person even felt like he was being hit in the arm by pellets that were coming from a miniature rocket that he saw. One person even grabbed a doorknob in his vision and felt an electric shock. Another one had a hallucination of hearing a full choir accompanying his vision of the sun rising over a church. Heron stated in the article, “The subjects had little control over the content “of their visions. One man could see nothing but dogs, another nothing but eyeglasses of various