Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness Quotes

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In “The yellow Wallpaper”, author, Charlotte Gilman writes a tale about a woman who suffers from a mental illness. She was never given a name throughout the whole story; therefore, we will call her John’s wife because that is all we seem to know. John, who was a physician, has wrongly diagnosed his wife. He brought her to this beautiful mansion in hopes to recover her illness. But here we find out the mansion only causes her illness to deteriorate. One most revealing quote that sets the feeling of the house off is shown here: “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house and reach the height of romantic felicity” (238). Immediately after they pulled up, john’s wife could sense something was not right with this house. “Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And …show more content…

An important theme throughout this story is the importance of self-expression. John’s wife is forced to hide her anxieties and fears in order to portray that her illness is improving. “But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (239). Taking in the fact that her husband is a physician, the physician’s wife should not have mental problems or cry. Finally, Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol. John’s wife describes it: “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly Sulphur tint in others” (240). Gilman uses the wallpaper to symbolize the great amount of women out there who feel trapped by medicine and family. At the end of the story, Gilman describes how John’s wife started to rip the paper off the wall. She locked herself in the room and threw the key so nobody could get in there. Once John retrieved the key, he unlocked the door to find his wife tearing apart the

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