There is a fine between crazy and desperate, but what would be considered seeing a woman beyond the walls, a cry for help or just pure insanity. In the narrative “ The yellow wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an unnamed, wife and mother in the 1800’s is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression. During this time, the cure for women was to be on bed rest, away from any form of stress. Therefore, the narrator’s husband takes her to an isolated estate in the country, where is is cut off from everything she loves, but she secretly writes to keep herself sane. Unfortunately as the story progresses, the writing fails to save her and the narrator’s illness becomes more visible, and more serious. She sits in one room of the house all …show more content…
The author describes the wallpaper as a disturbing and unsettling sight. It often makes the narrator uncomfortable, while using personification the yellow wall is brought to life and the narrator explains it as if the wallpaper were a person in the room along with her. The narrator describes the wallpaper as “poor thing” and that there is a woman inside of the wall that “shakes the pattern”(Gilman 655). As the story develops the real meaning of the woman beyond the wallpaper becomes more clear. The wallpaper is illustrated as if it were none other but the narrator herself. The poor wallpaper and the woman the shakes the pattern attempting to set herself free. Almost as if the wallpaper were her ‘poor’ illness and she is shaking the expectations set upon her by John, attempting to be free. She also begins to talk about how when the woman gets out of the wallpaper when no one is around, she creeps throughout the room and the outside, not wanting to be found or seen. The narrator’s true self creeping around when John isn’t around, attempting not to be seen or found, afraid of the possibility of getting sent away. Finally as the story progresses the true meaning of the wall paper and the woman beyond it begin to become even more visible. She speaks about the wallpaper saying “it slaps you in the face, knocks you
In 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a short story called the The Yellow Wallpaper. The story is told from a first person viewpoint, as the speaker writes within her journal. One of the themes in the story is a husband trying to deal with his wife’s mental illness. The speaker is a woman that is suffering from post-partum depression after recently having a child. During a summer vacation her husband, John, makes her stay in an upstairs room because of her mental state. John believes that keeping her in this room relieves stress within her mind. The speaker begins to develop psychosis because she has no mental stimulation other than her journal. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper on the wall, the only visually stimulating thing within the room. She begins to think that another woman is watching her
Her use of sensory words to describe the wallpaper and how is she is seeing things within the paper show she is not in her rational mind. The woman claims the wallpaper smells yellow (Gilman); a color cannot be smelled. Her senses are heightened because of this wallpaper. In her depiction of the wallpaper’s design, the narrator writes in great detail the images she is discovering. The curves of it “commit suicide”, the patterns “crawl” and “creep”, and there are “unblinking eyes are everywhere” (Gilman). In her mind, she is animating an inanimate object. The wallpaper becomes a terrifying object for both the narrator and the reader. Strangely, she also sees a woman trapped inside of the wallpaper, shaking invisible bars. Possibly due to her own circumstances, she is imagining herself as that very woman inside the wallpaper. Like the woman trapped, she also feels imprisoned and helpless. She repeatedly asks, “What is one to do?” (Gilman) as if she has no choice on what she wants to do. Her use of physical words to illustrate the wallpaper allows the readers to first feel her negative emotions but then sympathize with
In The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman is being "treated" by a doctor (her husband) for a condition he refers to as anxiety. She is placed in a room, apparently one that was previously inhabited by a mental patient, and told to rest. Over the course of a few weeks the woman begins to exhibit signs of paranoia and regularly has hallucinations. Through the course of the story, the woman continuously makes reference to the yellow wallpaper. The first, and possibly the greatest, gap in the story comes when interpreting the meaning(s) behind the wallpaper. Does the color yellow infer something about insanity? The woman repeatedly refers to the patterns that the peeling wallpaper makes. Do the patterns suggest order from chaos? It is apparent, from the number of times that it is mentioned, that the wallpaper plays a role in the mental changes the woman experiences (and details her changes) throughout the story. Part way through the story, she begins seeing a woman moving behind the wallpaper, as if trying to escape it. Is she actually seeing herself in the wallpaper, as suggested by Chris Tildon, or is the hallucination what she fears she is becoming? At the end of the story, she takes on the role of the "creeping" woman and follows a smudge around the room and over her fainted husband. This supports the idea that she is the woman that has been trapped in the paper. Maybe she feels trapped and tormented by John's lack of sympathy for her condition.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the narrator is a young woman who has moved into a strange old mansion with her psychiatrist husband. She is confined to her room as part of her treatment for a nervous breakdown. Isolated and forbidden to express herself creatively, she becomes obsessed with the garish yellow wallpaper. She becomes convinced there are women trapped behind the hideous pattern and eventually becomes lost in her delusions trying to free them (Gilman 1-15).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through such treatments. Because of her experience with the rest cure, it can even be said that Gilman based the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" loosely on herself. But I believe that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman/women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.
Although on the surface The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about one woman’s struggles with sanity it is not. In truth, it is a story about the dominant/submissive relationship between an oppressive husband and his submissive wife. The husband, John, pushes his wife’s depression to a point quite close to insanity. The narrator seems to destroy herself through her overactive imagination and her urge to write. When they arrive she seems well in control of her faculties, but by the time they are readying for departure, she has broken down. Flawed human nature seems to play a great role in her breakdown. Her husband, a noted physician, is unwilling to admit that there may be a real problem with his wife. This same attitude is mirrored in her brother, also a physician. While these attitudes, and the actions taken by the two doctors, seem to have certainly contributed to her breakdown, it seems that there is an underlying rebellious spirit in her.
The wallpaper is an “alternate reality, […] a prison inhabited by its former inmates, whose struggles have nearly destroyed it.” (Treichler). The inmates are figures of women, who have also suffered from the control of men. The women in the wallpaper are a direct representation of the narrator herself and also her unconsciousness trying to free herself from the seclusion her husband put her in. The wallpaper is horrid as are the struggles of the women who are prisoners of it. The narrator is at first repelled by the wallpaper as she grows “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” (Gilman). Her spitefulness of the wallpaper shows her being reluctant to accept the dark reality of her husband dominance of her. However, despite the narrator’s malice towards the wallpaper “she not only grows to like it, but goes so far as to become, in her mind, literally one with it” (Suess). The narrator then creates a new “self-identity and sense of communality though her connection with and ultimately her transformation into the women/woman in the wallpaper” (Suess). As like the women in the wallpaper who are prisoners, the narrator realizes she is also a prisoner of the wallpaper. The wallpaper therefore symbolizes the narrator. However, narrator sees the pattern “strangles {the women] off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white”
The yellow wall paper, for which the story is named, plays a major role. The narrator becomes obsessed with deciphering its illogical, incomprehensible pattern. She writes in her diary that she feels the wallpaper contains a malevolent force that threatens the home. When left alone she studies the wallpaper and begins to imagine seeing a figure within it. Once she realizes this she tries to convince her husband to leave the home, but John feels she is improving and wants to stay. The narrator declines in mental state, the obsession of the wallpaper takes over, she writes in her diary that she believes she is starting to make sense of the pattern; she grows paranoid of her husband and sister Jennie. The top pattern of the wallpaper contains stripes which she believes are bars, and behind the bars she feels there is a trapped woman who creeps whom she is determined to
In the 19th century society was from different from what it is today. Women were not in the workforce, could not vote, or even have a say in anything. Women were not permitted to give evidence in court, nor, did they have the right to speak in public before an audience. When a woman married, her husband legally owned all she had (including her earnings, her clothes and jewelry, and her children). If he died, she was entitled to only a third of her husband’s estate. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wanted to change this. She wanted people to understand the plight of women in the 19th century. In her short story The Yellow Wallpaper she tries to convey this to the reader not just on a literal level, but through various symbols in the story. In The Yellow Wallpaper the author uses symbols to show restrictions on women, lack of public interaction, the struggle for equality, and the possibilities of the female sex during the 1800s.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the reader journeys into the complex, deteriorating mind of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Through symbolism, Gilman issues a profound statement against the accepted subjugation of women during the 19th century. The narrator's internal dialogue sets the tone of the story and allows the reader to experience her horrifying delusions. Additionally, the use of irony illustrates the repressive nature of her marital relationship. In the end, both freedom and insanity lie behind the yellow wallpaper of the narrator’s world.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a self-told story about a woman who approaches insanity. The story examines the change in the protagonist's character over three months of her seclusion in a room with yellow wallpaper and examines how she deals with her "disease." Since the story is written from a feminist perspective, it becomes evident that the story focuses on the effect of the society's structure on women and how society's values destruct women's individuality. In "Yellow Wallpaper," heroine's attempt to free her own individuality leads to mental breakdown.
The yellow wallpaper is about a couple who has an unequal relationship. The husband is a doctor, and the wife is suffering from severe mental illness. The husband rents out a mansion in the countryside symbolizing as an asylum. She was kept in the attic of the mansion in a strange room cover in yellow wallpaper. There are four windows facing toward every direction, but all four windows are barred. The wife grows more insane looking at the wallpaper. The wallpaper has a strange, formless pattern, and Gilman (1892) describes it as “revolting” and behind the pattern of the wallpaper she thinks that she see women who are trying to escape. On the last day at the mansion, the wife locks the door and refuses to leave disobeying her husband. When the
The narrator gives eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpaper; she was obsessed with it. She started to see things in the wallpaper that others did not see. “Behind the outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder - I begin to think - I wish John would take me away from here!”
The wallpaper also represents her lack of power. She creeps by day and stays still by the moonlight. She animates herself through the wallpaper, because she ‘creeps’ when John is away treating people, and is still by night when he is home, because he would see her and not approve of her actions. The woman does all she can do to tear off the paper, and in the end, ends up becoming one with the paper. It seemed when the wife focused more and more on the wallpaper, her condition continued to develop. Patterns started to develop in the wallpaper when she stared at it for a long time, and she started to see shapes and shadows in it. She saw bars, which made the room her literal prison, and she saw the shadows which could be the way that the woman depicted herself in this time, as a shadow of her former self: Before the baby, before the illness, when she was healthy. Both of these stories are symbolically women crying out for acceptance as equal members in