People who keep their problems to themselves over a period of time will go crazy. This idea is most certainly proven in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story starts in what seems to be a run down English mansion, but almost scary enough looking to be an old asylum for crazy people. The narrator moves here because her husband, being a physician, misdiagnosed her and put her on bed rest, when instead she was just having postpartum depression and should have been trying to do daily duties. The narrator grows bored because she is isolated from everyone except her husband and nurse and she quickly deteriorates. She starts to imagine crazy things, like women trapped inside the horrid yellow wallpaper. She tries to help her …show more content…
The ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” should not have been a surprise because of the foreshadowing: descriptions of the room’s destruction, references to the narrator’s mental condition, and her increasing paranoia toward others all indicate her craziness.
One way the author foreshadows that the narrator is becoming mentally unstable is by making references to her mental state. While looking at the wallpaper, the narrator “never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before. . . [She] used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store” (par. 66). The narrator is beginning to obsess over the wallpaper and has always found herself fond of watching inanimate objects, much unlike other normal children. Leading into the middle of the story, she “[got] positively angry with the impertinence of [the wallpaper].” (par. 65). The narrator is starting to hate the look of the horrid wallpaper and this will lead to the beginning of her craziness. She became more crazed as the story went on, as she thought she “[could see a strange, provoking, formless
In Alan Brown’s article “The Yellow Wallpaper’: Another Diagnosis”; Brown discusses why Charolette Perkins Gilman published The Yellow Wallpaper as well as another diagnosis on the character in The Yellow Wallpaper. In the article it is explained that Gilman published this short story as a reflection of her own life. Gilman battled depression and sought out help from expert neurologist. The neurologist had suggested that she rest and be confined to her room. This experience lead to the creation of The Yellow Wallpaper. Being confined to a room like the character in The Yellow Wallpaper is enough to drive anyone to insanity. Brown had a different idea on why the character lost her mind and began to believe she was seeing figures in the wallpaper.
She begins to tear strips of the wallpaper and continues to do so all night until morning yards of the paper are stripped off. Her sister-in-law Jennie offers to help, but at this point the narrator is territorially protective of the wallpaper. She locks herself in the room and is determined to strip the wall bare. As she is tearing the wallpaper apart she sees strangled heads in the pattern shrieking as the wallpaper is being torn off. At this point, she is furious and even contemplates jumping out the window, yet even in her euphoric state, she realizes this gesture could be misinterpreted.
The wallpaper in her bedroom is a hideous yellow. "It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others" (pg 393) The wallpaper is symbolic of the sickness the author has by the end of the story. Yellow is often a color associated with illness. It’s been suggested that she herself was clawing at the paper during moments of insanity. But there are many times when she is sane, and sees the marks on the wallpaper, and she writes about how others who had spent time in this room tried to remove the paper as well.
All through the story, the yellow wallpaper acts as an antagonist, causing her to become very annoyed and disturbed. There is nothing to do in the secluded room but stare at the wallpaper. The narrator tells of the haphazard pattern having no organization or symmetrical plot. Her constant examination of and reflection on the wallpaper caused her much distress.... ...
Her mental state is again revealed a few pages later when she states, "It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight" (Gilman 430). Related to thought disorder is obsession, which the protagonist displays in her relentless thoughts about the yellow wallpaper which covers her bedroom walls. The narrator begins her obsession with the yellow wallpaper at the very beginning of the story. "I never saw a worse paper in my life," she says. "It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study" (Gilman 427)....
The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is slowly deteriorating in mental state. When she first moves into the room in the old house, the wallpaper intrigues her. Its pattern entrances her and makes her wonder about its makeup. But slowly her obsession with the wallpaper grows, taking over all of her time. She starts to see the pattern moving, and imagines it to be a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. The total deterioration of her sanity is reached when she becomes the woman she imagined in the wallpaper and begins creeping around the room.
Frightening details begin to unfold about the room, including: barred windows, a bolted down bed, and of course, the wallpaper itself (227). Gilman uses the imagery to create an air of suspense and insinuates the narrator’s coming fall into insanity. The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in large, leads to the narrator’s collapse. Almost instantly, the narrator’s already unstable mind perceives a ghostliness that begins to set her even more on edge. Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband,
“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.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a very unique and odd story. In the first read through of the story, the reader is aware that the narrator is sick and losing her mind. Over the course of the story it becomes apparent that the treatment used to heal the narrator isn’t effective. As she begins to completely lose her mind the reader gets a glimpse into her mind. She believes that she is trapped inside of the wallpaper, and by ripping it off the wall she can escape. There are several topics that seem to occur in this story. These topics include Feminism, the role of women in the 1880’s period, and knowledge and understanding of mentally ill. Although these are some of the main points in the story, The Yellow Wallpaper has several topics that are direct
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main theme is confinement. The narrator is confined to a single room in a huge house. Her husband often spends his nights in town, to fulfill his role as a doctor. The narrator attempts to deal with her fears and isolation. Due to her confinement, she starts losing her sanity (Perkins 175). It can be seen that the narrator slowly turns mad. Her mind turns into a chaotic situation and she starts seeing shapes in the wallpaper. However, in reality, there is no woman entrapped in the wallpaper. The narrator thinks that way because she starts losing her grip on
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
...lor that made the woman despise it so very much. By being able to understand the various meanings behind the wallpaper the reader is able to fully comprehend the narrative behind the entire story and why her mental health keeps diminishing. The ending of the story reveals that the woman no longer only saw the woman in the walls at night; she began to believe that she actually was said woman.
The wallpaper, the narrator's obsession, destroyed the peace of mind for all parties concerned. The imagery, used in the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", paints a vivid picture and the reader becomes a front row spectator to the mental deterioration of the narrator to utter insanity.
In the short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator chooses to write about a married woman in a new home who ultimately falls down into a spiral of insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper centers primarily on the narrator and her discovery in the room she must stay in to rest. There she sees a yellow wallpaper that soon begins to take the form of a woman who is trapped, and is shaking the wallpaper in order to get out. The narrator continues trying to figure out the wallpaper and its pattern until eventually deciding to rip the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the creeping woman trapped inside. Thus, the narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper suffers a mental collapse by going insane in her attempt to understand the wallpaper which can be attributed
The way Gilman describes the wallpaper tells of what the narrator's mind is thinking, 'and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.';(Gillman 206) She doesn't think this on the conscious level but more on the unconscious level. When the narrator writes, '(The designs) destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.';(Gillman 206) She is speaking of her state of mind subconsciously, the narrator is on the brink of losing her mind at this point. Gillman writes, 'There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. '(Gillman 207) She was explaining how the wallpaper is like a 'watchdog'; or a guard of some type, watching her every move, naturally making her nervous.