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Early history of mental illness essay
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No person is inherently mad; humans have caused other humans to drown their own sanity which can then submerge that person into an ocean of madness. Historically, madness had become a common occurrence with women due to several stress factors they must endure on a daily basis: finding a husband, baring children, raising children, find a suitable job, retaining femininity, and more. Authors Charlotte Gilman and Jhumpa Lahiri explored the psyche of two women who were facing very stressful situations. Gilman’s The Yellow-Wallpaper, introduces her readers to an unnamed nineteenth century woman who is slowly falling into madness. The protagonist must endure the “rest cure” where she must live without artistic expression, human contact, or freedom to go where she pleases. After months of enduring, she is ultimately shoved into madness by her husband, whom originally started her treatment. Lahiri’s protagonist, Aparna, is forced into an arranged marriage, and then moves to Boston with her new husband to live a new life with their daughter, Usha. Aparna is being neglected by her husband, finds it difficult to adjust to Boston culture, and spends most of her time being a house wife. She finally finds a friend, and possibly a love, in another Bengali man named Pranab. Once he was engaged and then married, Aparna revels to Usha that she was on the brink of committing suicide. Both characters were being controlled and had little to no say in what they could or could not do. These restraints with the added on stress that they faced cause both to the edge of madness. Women who had to withstand the struggles of doing what is expected of them while still attempting to do what they desire encounter many restraints that force them to stray away fr...
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...self-expression can then lose themselves.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte P. "Gilman, Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman, Why I Wrote The
Yellow Wallpaper. The Forerunner, 1913. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper” DiYanni, Robert. The Yellow
Wallpaper. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 6th ed. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2007. 542-52. Print.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Hell-Heaven” DiYanni, Robery. Hell-Heaven. Literature: Reading
Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. 348-361. Print.
Muhi, Maysoon T. ""Much Madness Is the Divinest Sense": Madness in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"" "Much Madness Is the Divinest Sense": Madness in
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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 Wallpaper." 1892. The New England Magazine. Reprinted in "Lives & Moments - An Introduction to Short Fiction" by Hans Ostrom. Hold,
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
“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.” ...
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction To Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. 7th Ed. New York, Norton, 1998. 2: 630-642.
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
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.
Wohlpart, Jim. American Literature Research and Analysis Web Site. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”” 1997. Florida Gulf Coast University
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in it's quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce (Lauter 799). Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.
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.
Gilman, Charlotte. Perkins. The “Yellow Wallpaper” is a new feature. The Story and Its Writer. Ann Charters.
“The Yellow Wall Paper” is the story about a journey of a woman who is suffering from a nervous breakdown, descending into madness through her “rest cure” treatment. Basically, the woman is not allowed to read, write or to see her new-born baby. Charlotte Perkins Gilman captures the essence of this journey into madness by using the first person narration. The story plot’s is by taking the reader through the horrors of one woman’s neurosis to make strong statements about the oppression faced by women in their marriage roles. The narrator’s mental condition is characterized by her meeting with the wallpaper in her room. In addition to the story’s plot, the use of symbolism and irony throughout her story also show how males dominate during her time.
“I never saw so much expression in an inanimate object before.” (The Yellow Wallpaper) In order to understand Charlotte Gilman’s stories one must first know about the life she lead. In 1884 Charlotte married her husband Charles Walter Stetson and began to sink into depression. During this time Gilman wrote her famous story The Yellow Wallpaper (Radcliffe). Within the story the reader can pick out parts of Gilman’s own life woven into it. Gilman, like the main character Jane had postpartum depression as a result of this she divorced Stetson and sent their daughter to live with him and his second wife. In 1900 Gilman subsequently married her first cousin George Houghton Gilman. Unlike her first marriage this one was happy and fulfilling until
Gilman, Charlotte P. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The story and its writer: An introduction to short fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 340-351.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Mineola: Dover, 1997. Print.