In Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she tells a horrific ghost story about symptoms of the rest cure. The “rest cure” was a treatment developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who restricted women of intellectual stimuli and condemned them to a domestic life to help their postpartum recovery. After being a victim of this treatment, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Careful attention to the use of Gilman’s symbols in her short story allows the reader to analyze some of the themes concerning feminism and societal misogyny. Foreshadowing throughout, Gilman uses the house, the writing, and the wallpaper as symbols to show how man’s use of the “rest cure” limit women in society and offers that the solution to this issue is to persistently tear away at man’s injustice.
Finding Freedom Through Insanity: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper The early nineteenth-century marked a time for women known as Imperial Motherhood; an era that glorified the reproductive roles of women and scaled a woman’s worth based on her ability and willingness to form unbreakable maternal bonds with her children. Relinquishing herself when she married, a woman of this era was expected to sacrifice her wants, needs, and desires not only to fulfill her obligations to her husband, but to provide selfless and attentive care for her children. Emotional reactions were highly discouraged and outbursts of anger or discontent were viewed as signs of weakness and hysteria (Theroit). During the mid-late-nineteenth century, women began to view marriage and motherhood as more of an
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story that deals with the concepts of gender difference and madness. The narrator in the story is a ‘bad’ and ‘unsuccessful’ woman and is also mentally-ill. Gilman criticizes the mainstream opinions regarding those concepts using symbolism and imagery. Gilman uses imagery and symbolism when describing the windows and the wallpaper, which helps the reader better understand the differences between ‘normal’ people’s outlook and the one of an insane person, such as the narrator. The windows are a symbol of the way most people, according to Gilman, view the world.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman deals with the narrator’s insanity as she identifies herself completely with the woman in the wallpaper. This made her believe that both she and the women have liberated themselves from masculine oppression by tearing out the domesticated prisoner in the wallpaper. Also, with the narrator being diagnosed with postpartum depression after her pregnancy, she finds herself isolated from society under the treatment of her husband who is a doctor and prescribes her not to do any form of duty/work. However, she is not the main reason to blame for her insanity because she had no chance of expressing herself but rather doing what her doctor “husband” says which lead to her inner destruction.
The Yellow Wallpaper and Repression In a multitude of ways, people are constantly being held back and suppressed. Now this could just be seen as the way of life and too often a time it is, but that’s not to say that being subjugated to this doesn’t have its effects. Sigmund Freud once said that “unexpressed emotions will never die; they are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” Obviously this is true whether it occurs to someone or not
What would you do if you were emotionally imprisoned? The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, inspired by true events, provides insight to the life of a middle-class woman in late 19th century. The narrator uses a first person journalistic style in order to recount a string of events that occurred while staying in a sort of get-away home. Practically imprisoned by her governing physician husband, and prescribed with hysteria, the narrator describes her gradual descent into insanity through periodical journal entries. The couple moved to an isolated house in order to relieve the protagonist from work and effort but only paved way for a greater problem.
How does Charlotte Gilman approach the idea of women writing in her story The Yellow Wallpaper? In the 1890s, women were seen as intellectually incompetent; men perceived writing to encourage negative ideas in women. In the story The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman conveys how work and expression through writing is good for the female mind, despite common belief. Only when the narrator is encouraged to stop writing does her mind begin to unravel. The work of writing was keeping the narrator sane; it was her hold on humanity: the world outside of the room with the horrendous wallpaper.
In the “Yellow Wallpaper” from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman suffering from nervous depression narrates her own story. Her husband and her occupy a curious mansion for the summer. He choses to establish their bedroom in the nursery at the top of the house. The first description of this room appears quite positive despite some disturbing elements she mentions: “the windows are barred”, “there are rings and things in the walls” (194) and especially the awful yellow wallpaper she starts describing in a troubling way: “it is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (194). She confesses, her husband John, a physician, wants the best for her and is doing everything in his power to help her recovering from her
“Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good,” (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” 779). In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Gilman writes of her lasting nervous breakdown, forcing confinement upon her inside of a nursery surrounded by a mysterious, twisting, and seemingly glooming yellow wallpaper. During this period of isolation, Gilman’s husband, John, forbids her to work and write. However, Gilman opposes this rule, ultimately realizing that her love and practice of writing aids in fighting her illness. “The Yellow Wallpaper” reinforces the theme of staying true to oneself despite the weight of society through its use of the setting, symbolism, and conflict.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates an example of mental illness seen in women in the late nineteenth century. Because of the time the short story was set in, women did not have many choices. Their husbands were dominant over them, meaning they were to obey their partner at all times. Most women’s lives in the nineteenth century are an aimless pattern. They work throughout their day doing the same thing they’ve done since they became a woman.
“And women should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body” (Direct 1). In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a wife and mother, faces postpartum depression and, treatment that is unfit for her by her husband. The resting cure increases her psychological behavior causing her to hallucinate. The women lose all form of self-awareness and is expected to conform to what is expected of her in the 19th century. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman demonstrates the issues women faced during 1892 using theme, point of view, and symbolism.
Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period.
Are we women or are we property? The Yellow Wallpaper, a dramatic short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, concerns a woman who is mentally ill and is misdiagnosed by her physician, confining her in a room. Her mental health state regresses as she goes from wanting to escape the room to accepting it and no longer wishing to leave. This state is exacerbated by the relationship with her husband, who is also her diagnosing physician. The treatment of the purposefully unnamed narrator mirrors the treatment of women in Victorian times.
This story was published when new ideas were coming into society. In earlier times, a woman's place was in her home, where she carried out the roles of wife and mother. Men, on the other hand, were involved in work, politics and economics. However this way of thinking began to change as women started to fight for their rights and pursued equality with men. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist, but she focused more on the unequal status of women within marriage.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high
