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Yellow wallpaper critical analysis
Portrayal of women in literature
How do gender roles play a part in literature
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Counting on others for one’s own well-being, is that a mistake? Or is just an act of over trust? The Yellow Wallpaper is the struggle of a women feeling as if she is losing her mind. An overbearing and controlling husband makes every effort to try and “fix” his wife to make her better, even if that means confining her to a single room. Despite the husbands best efforts he cannot take away the thoughts and images in his wife’s head. Too much trust is put into the husbands hands, to leave the wife with no voice. This story shines light to how much men really dominated society, and how controlling the male species is. As a result, leaving the subservient wife’s the ones that suffer the consequences of their significant other. When a small case …show more content…
From the narrator she starts to see patterns within the wallpaper and progressively as her obsession get worse a woman appears. The silhouette of a woman “Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady parts she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.” (PG 654) The woman in the wallpaper is actually a reflection of what the narrator feels. The narrator feels trapped and creates this imagine in her head of a woman that is trapped behind bars and cannot get out. No Her brain keeps thinking and thinking about the wallpaper, trying to figure out the movement of the patterns and the images in the wallpaper. To anyone else the wallpaper never moves but to the narrator it does. Her condition gets worse as the weeks pass and the more her obsession consumes her. Staying up every night to configure the images and …show more content…
It is just up to an individual to recognize and do something about it before it is too late. The narrator reached her breaking point at the end of the story, but at that point her condition turned into something more severe than it started out to be. No one should be left alone when going through a tough time in their life. Creating the imagines of the woman in the wallpaper was a desperate attempt for help. Representing how trapped the narrator felt in the room. Not sleeping all night and locking herself in the room to finally do something about the wallpaper the narrator hated so much. By doing this the narrator was not only freeing the woman but also freeing herself from that room. John would finally know the extent of her illness and maybe would pay his wife some attention. At that point it was kind of too late to help, but only time could tell if the damage could be
While on vacation for the summer, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is, at the most, depressed at the beginning of their visit to a colonial mansion. Her husband John, however, thinks there is nothing wrong with her except temporary nervous depression (pg 391) and has her confined to a bedroom upstairs. I believe John loves her very much and is trying to help her get well, but he won’t believe there is an illness unless he can read about it or see something physical with his own eyes. "He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." (pg 391) During the time of this writing it was the norm that men dominated women. Women were to be seen but not heard. They were not to argue with men, so she was forced to do as he said. Her husband has forbidden her to "work" until she is well again. (pg 392) She is held prisoner in her bedroom and has nothing to do to keep her mind active except stare at the wallpaper, although she did sneak in writing in her journal when possible.
Nevertheless, her attempts are futile as he dismisses her once more, putting his supposed medical opinion above his wife’s feelings. The story takes a shocking turn as she finally discerns what that figure is: a woman. As the story progresses, she believes the sole reason for her recovery is the wallpaper. She tells no one of this because she foresees they may be incredulous, so she again feels the need to repress her thoughts and feelings. On the last night of their stay, she is determined to free the woman trapped behind bars.
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
The pattern on the wallpaper represents to the narrator and to the reader the male-dominated society that is depriving the narrator of her freedom. For the narrator, on a personal level, the pattern on the wallpaper represents the actions of her husband, doctor and her husband's sister to keep her locked in the room and idle. While these people are ostensibly attempting to aid the narrator, they are in effect imprisoning her i...
The narrator finally achieves an authoritative position in her marriage, with John unconscious and her creative imagination finally free of all restraints. Her continual “creeping” over his prone body serves as a repeated emphasis of this liberation, almost as if the narrator chooses to climb over him to highlight his inferiority over and over again” (Harrison). John was a weak person, Jane suffered from a nervous disorder which was made way worse by the feelings of being trapped in a room. The setting of the nursery room with barred windows in a colonial mansion provides an image of the loneliness and seclusion she experienced. Periods of time can lead to insanity. Maybe her illness wasn’t that bad but he made it worse on her part because he was a sick husband. Some critics have argued “Is the narrator really liberated? We’re inclined towards saying “no”, given that she’s still creeping around the room and that her psyche is broken”
The narrator identifies the figure to be a woman, and realizes “at night, in any kind of light…it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (). At this point, she can create a relationship to the “woman” based off the similarities they share with each other, such as how they both are trapped by this wallpaper. They are both forcibly immobilized, and the lack of movement and interaction is driving the narrator past her breaking point to where she can connect to a person in the wallpaper that surrounds the room. The author uses the growing relationship to uncover her opinion about the rest cure which is that the choice of leaving the patient to lay and rest for such long periods of time will create a feeling of being trapped, and when trapped, the mind can go to rot just by baking in its own thoughts and fantasies. It is a remedy for insanity, and an outcome such as that would hold contrary to the expectations of this treatment. At the final moment of the story, just as the treatment comes to a close, we see the narrator reach her breaking point. She rips down the wallpaper and exclaims “I’ve got out at last” to her terrified husband as she “creeps” around the room (). The trapped
Finally, the yellow wallpaper presents perspectives of how men control females. As stated previously, In the story, John uses his power as a doctor to control his wife. He encaged his wife in a summer home, placing her in a room filled with barricades and many faults. As a human she is deprived of her rights and her ability to form house duties is taken away so she can rest as he calls it. Without a doubt, she fell into insanity because of the situation she was placed in. When she ripped the paper off the wall, it was a sign of freedom from her husband, and the bars that held her captive for weeks. Certainly she has a vivid imagination and being placed in bondage and unable to write which in turn lead her to mental health problems.
Being controlled by her husband the woman turns to the only things she can control, her mind. She becomes intrigued with the patterns in the wallpaper in her room, which is more like a cell than a room. She begins to see patterns in the wallpaper; she is obsessed with trying to find what the pattern is about and what meaning it holds.
The narrator, already suffering from a "nervous condition," is forced to stay in her bedroom for most of the story. Her husband does not let her do anything that may take the least bit of energy because she needs to concentrate her energy on getting well. Her mental condition quickly deteriorates from the original "nervous condition" to complete insanity due to this isolation. As the narrator begins to see figures behind the wallpaper, the reader realizes that the wallpaper is a manifestation of her condition.
The wallpaper, the center of the story, the perceived reason for her madness, was simply just wallpaper that she disliked. Every time she would describe it, her delusions would continually get worse. "I never saw a worse paper in my life." (Gilman) is her first observation of the paper. She strongly believed that there was a woman, "A strange, provoking, formless sort of figure." (Gilman) behind that paper who was creeping outside and around her room. She strongly believed that she needed to help this woman be free of the wretched wallpaper. She strongly believed that the wallpaper had a "yellow smell" (Gilman). No one could possibly make her disbelieve for one second that the woman didn't move about and yearn to be free of the strangling pattern. She believes that she is the only person who understands and can get the woman out of her
She is left with no choice but to stare at the wallpaper endlessly and begins to see things within the pattern. She insists there is a woman behind the paper "and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so" (667). This is representative to women's power being "strangled" by man and that there are women everywhere trying to escape and break free from the suppression and she sees herself as one of those woman behind the wallpaper creeping around trying to get out.
In Charlotte Bronte’s’, The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is healthy until her husband, John moves her into a new house where she is confined and is in solitude. The Yellow Wallpaper makes Charlotte Bronte go mad, mentally and physically. Charlotte’s husband, John believes since she is sickly he should confine her in an attic with a cure called The Rest Cure which means the patient can not do anything but sit around their room all day. I chose this story because of the intense amount of detail in the room as well as with Bronte’s rapidly changing personality.
Obviously, it is impossible to maintain a healthy mental state in the oppressive environment surrounding the woman. Throughout the story, the author traces the woman's mental deterioration from a having a normal but weakened sense of self, to a complete inversion of her ego. She slowly inverts her orientation of her place in society, turning away from society completely in order to create a world where she can act on her own volition. In order to represent the stages of her gradually worsening state of mind, the author represents the woman's struggles through a parallel with her view of the wallpaper. The wallpaper is at first a seeming inversion of the woman's mind, but it is gradu...
Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband, John. As one of the few characters in the story, John plays a pivotal role in the regression of the narrator’s mind. Again, the narrator uses the wallpaper to convey her emotions. Just as the shapes in the wallpaper become clearer to the narrator, in her mind, she is having the epiphany that John is in control of her.
When the narrator states, “I can see her out of my windows! I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden” (Gilman 1006). The reader knows there is no actual woman trapped behind the wallpaper; in fact this is a hallucination that seems to be caused by forced isolation as part of her treatment.