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In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane is a mentally ill woman whose surroundings are only worsening her condition. Jane’s husband, a physician, thinks that a change of scenery will benefit her condition and takes it upon himself to relocate to a summer home, not knowing that this new environment will be Jane’s downfall. The entire story is written as a journal, inscribed by Jane whenever she can stealthily disobey her husband to write. Gilman writes the story from Jane’s point of view to coax the reader into a deeper understanding of Jane’s mental battles and the overall theme of oppression. Gilman’s choice of style for this short story exponentially enhances the effectiveness of the text because the reader is opened
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.
“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.
As someone who suffers from depression, it is easy to relate to the main character of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The difference though, is that I am able to talk about my problems, and express my feelings to my significant other. She, however, is not allowed to. She has to push her problems aside and is forced to deal with the problems on her own.
Perkins Gilman has written several stories surrounding the women’s movement. In The Yellow Wallpaper there have been main points surrounding the main characters feelings and thoughts about the wallpaper. There have also been main points concerning how the feminist approach has been used in The Yellow Wallpaper. Questions have arisen when discussing how the women in the story were being portrayed. Feminism is having the same rights as men and being viewed as someone who is important in life.
The plot begins when the narrator sees the house that her husband John has taken for the summer. She immediately feels as if something about the situation is weird. This then leads to her discussion of her illness, “nervous depression” and of her marriage. John her husband and her doctor belittles both her and her illness. Her treatment is prescribed as nothing active, including writing and working.
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.
Trapped within her own mind, oppressed by a faithful spouse, a victim of malpractice, and stripped of the rights to be a dutiful wife as well as a loving mother, Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a vivid fictional narrative that symbolizes the entrapment and suffering that many women of the nineteenth century lived through. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, creates a narrator who suffers from a mental illness, in a time where clinical psychology, and depression had yet not been explored, nor studied. The narrator’s husband, John, handles her illness terribly. In the narrative “The Yellow Wallpaper” John, as a medical practitioner, as well as a husband, is negligent, controlling, and mentally abuses the narrator.
The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”
“The Yellow Wallpaper “written by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is a phycological and feminist masterpiece. Gillman a women’s right activist, mother, wife, and writer lived in a time where women were kept in a position that prevented them from existing outside one’s home life. Women were subjugated and degraded during this time, and this inequality and prison like conditions created the feeling of trapped or confined in one’s own family often leading to mental breakdown or illness. This subjection of women led Charlotte Perkins Gillman to the conclusion that women were being hindered from having both intelligent and creative growth.
The protagonist epitomizes middle-class womenfolk in the 19th century and her husband epitomizes menfolk in contemporary society. When she is being controlled by her husband, it symbolizes the women’s conduct being controlled by the patriarchal culture of the time. The supremacy exercised by these 19th-century men over their women become prisons from which victims like Gilman and her protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper must
She identified the yellow wallpaper as a metaphor for women’s discourse. The narrator’s underlying feelings of confusion, depression, and frustration was covered by the yellow wallpaper which she rips from the walls at the very end to reveal “what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque or fails to perceive at all” (35). The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as the conflict of gender inequality and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The imagery reflects on how women feel toward sexual inequality and the situation with
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the pain women had to go through to be heard. The whole story demonstrates Gilman 's view on feminism through the male and female dialogue in the. As well as the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper itself and the imprisonment its captured. One can learn from the story that gender roles should be removed as they can cause a feeling of imprisonment and psychological struggles on women, as well as women, should live
