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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Body In Pain

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Physical pain according to Elaine Scarry is an “absolute slip between one’s sense of one’s reality and the reality of other people.” (4 Scarry) One of the things that I learned this semester after taking the Body in Pain class and having the opportunity of attending House of Loreto Nursing Home is how physical pain can be as painful as mental pain. In many cases, physical pain has no voice. As the audience, we are incapable of feeling and understanding how much pain they are experiencing. In the essay “Body In pain”, Scarry writes about the difficulty of expressing pain and how “Physical pain has no voice but when it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story.” (3 Scarry) After visiting my resident and learning about her constant battle between …show more content…

What older people need the most is that people give them an hour of their time and to show interest and empathy towards what they are trying to express. I have volunteered in different nursing homes through my whole life and one of the things that I noticed is how older women expressed feeling of discontent and possibly symptoms of depression due to the fact that most of the hours of the days they are by themselves. In the book “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator and the main character in the story mentions how “No one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”(8 Gilman) By this line, we can infer that she feels unhappy about dealing with mental illness by herself and not having the support of her loved ones. Further in the reading, she mentions “It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship.” (4 Gilman) I feel that the course reading has a strong connection with the nursing home since it clearly depicts how many people, including those dealing with mental disorders such as depression, seek help in those who they love, but in many cases the family is absent-minded and oblivious of how much suffering the patient is dealing with at a certain

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