The color yellow, when used negatively, represents sickness or weakness. in "the yellow wallpaper", Charlotte Perkins Stetson uses the wallpaper to represent how the main character is perceived by her husband, but also to help her understand herself. To her husband it is just wallpaper, but to her it becomes the personification of her life. The appearance she is forced to perceive versus the reality of her mind is expressed in the setting, the symbols use, and the irony of her situation.
Since her husband, a physician of high standard, has prescribed a "rest cure" for her nervous condition, the protagonist is forced to suppress her creative urges and conform to societal expectations of a submissive and passive wife who is to remain still in a room with “the yellow wallpaper.” This suppression ultimately leads to her descent into madness as she struggles to reconcile her own desires with the expectations placed upon her. While the lady narrates the entire story, it is interesting to note that she is not in control of her own life and decisions. Rather, she is a victim of societal norms and gender roles that restrict her agency and
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.
At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman writes of her husband’s diagnosis for her illness saying, “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-- a slight hysterical tendency-- what is one to do?”(Lynch para.
Within the mind of the Narrator, she would always admit to the reader that she has a mental illness. Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Stetson explained the story in First Person, as if it was a diary, and it showed how she was slowly going insane with the wallpaper in the baby’s room. With the narrator’s opinion about the wallpaper, she found the whole thing to be disgusting and vile, which can be figured to imagery, foreshadowing and the point of view that is presented in the story. First of all, Stetson did not grow very fond of the yellow wallpaper as it may have represented her troubles, such as her marriage, family and even her own life. She had described it directly and firmly that the color is “a smoldering unclean yellow”(Stetson)
Though she is unaware of it, she was responsible for the damages to the bedstead. In addition, her changing perspective on the wallpaper indicates her becoming increasingly unreliable. At first, she states that” This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern…a particularly irritating one.” (The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman). As she spends more time in the nursery as part of her treatment and less time partaking in more stimulating activities, she starts to see the pattern as a living woman.
The woman was obsessed with the wallpaper she begins to hallucinate that something was creeping on her. She had locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in the bedroom with her because she was trying to trap the creeper that she thought she saw. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” say,“‘Open the door, my darling!’ , ‘I can’t,’ said I. ‘ The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf’”
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
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by, American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story was written during a time where men and women weren't treated equally, and in the case of mental illness, some women didn't get proper treatment they needed so they would end up getting worse then better. In this short story, that is exactly what happens. This story is about a woman named Jane, who has some sort of mental illness, and her husband John, a Physician, rents out a Colonial mansion for the summer so she can get better by having solitude and just needs to not do anything strenuous, that includes writing, which is one of her passions. She even says, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Examining “The Yellow Wallpaper” through a Marxist lens can be especially challenging. At first blush, this short story appears to be told from a purely feministic point of view, however, the text incorporates themes of power and oppression. Karl Marx was a sociologist who is famous for his work on the different classes and the power of money. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story does not make any obvious references to race or the working class, she does write about the oppression she faced from the men in her own life. Just like Karl Marx wrote about the oppression the working class felt from the wealthier class, so Gilman felt inferior to the men in her life and expressed that emotion through her writing.
In an attempt to avoid such maliciousness, the narrator’s husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes his assumed hysterical wife to a secluded house so she may begin the recovery process. Unfortunately, lack of knowledge about the brain during this time led to a treatment that furthered schizophrenic tendencies in the
The narrator leads a fairly boring life. The only thing she seems to do all day is sleep, write, eat, look out the window and study the yellow wallpaper in her room. Evidence of this in the story is “I lie here on this great immovable bed - it is nailed down, I believe - and follow that pattern about by the hour” (Gilman 650). Another piece of evidence would be, “The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering 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” (Gilman 649).
(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”
Mental Illness There are several important topics in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper. ”Throughout the story the narrator is experiencing severe mental illnesses. The audience can see the build up of the narrator's mental health and the way it declines throughout the short story. Gilman explains signs of madness, depression, despair, and negative self worth. The narrator has nothing to keep herself busy since she is required bed rest by her husband (Gilman 571).
However, the wallpaper in the room has a hideous yellow color with a strange pattern on it. The wallpaper makes his wife –and narrator of the story- very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, her husband denies her request to move to a different room, which was a terrible mistake. The longer
