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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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Recommended: Feminist lens on the yellow wallpaper

The story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is Charlotte Gilman’s interpretation of how women were treated and were thought that they were only useful in the home. The story follows the first person point of view of a woman who is struggling to break free from the irrational labels of being a woman that her husband is attempting to force upon her. The narrator dreams of being able to write freely and leave her home to be in the world she sees outside her window. However, John, the husband, convinces her that she has nervous depression, and that she is unable to leave the house until she is better. John, being a physician, believes that he knows exactly how her nervousness affects her and convinces himself and his wife that it is better for her to stay in the home until she is not “sick” any longer. …show more content…

The narrator even goes so far as to blame her sporadic and sometimes angry nature on her condition rather than her husband. Instead of lashing out against her husband, the narrator finds other ways to keep herself occupied, like examining their bedroom walls. The narrator finds the walls and wallpaper in the room to be very unflattering and suggests to her husband that she wants to repaper the walls and take down the yellow wallpaper. He refuses because he believes that giving her the freedom to change something in the house will allow her to gain enough freedom to change many more things about the house. The climax in the story comes as the narrator breaks free from all of the doubt her husband has filled her mind with and rips the wallpaper off of the walls. The husband comes home, finds the bedroom door locked, and then passes out as he soon realizes what the narrator is doing. The story is left with an unclear conclusion as the narrator uses her new found free will in order to continue tearing down the rest of the

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When writing a literary argumentative essay, I will need to choose a story and the topic from the story that I agree with and find reliable and credible sources to research and cite to support my thesis. In, Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's: The Yellow Wallpaper, for example one could argue as to whether the wife really had a psychological problem that her husband, a physician, was trying to treat, or if being confined and isolated drove her to

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Critical Statement: In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman employs exclamatory functions within her syntax to display the symbolism of the woman within the wallpaper to illustrate her own constricted freedom due the influence of the masculine dominance. In the beginning of the story, Gilman illustrates the wallpaper as a catalyst for exhibiting the intensity of the narrator’s psychological disorder. After the narrator and her husband settle into their new house, the narrator inspects her room, and begins discerning ominous relations and elements within the wallpaper.

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She is trapped inside of the house just like the woman stay inside of the wallpaper. Moreover, females can have their own thought only in the imagined world. In the reality, the narrator is obeyed everything to her husband, she cannot even have her own opinion. However, when she finds the woman in the wallpaper, she is eager to want to figure out what it is, and how she moves. She does not tell her husband because she has her own ideas and makes her own decisions.

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She decides that it would be the best to rip down the wallpaper to free the woman so she tears most of it off and creeps around her room. She fully loses her sanity. The ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” should not have been a surprise because of the foreshadowing: descriptions of the room’s destruction, references to the narrator’s mental condition, and her changing attitude toward the wallpaper. One way the author foreshadows that the narrator is becoming mentally unstable is by describing the room’s deteriorating condition. Toward the beginning of the story the narrator feels as if the room is “a big, airy room.. with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore” (par. 31).

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So, she hides it away from him. She also hides the journal from the maid. She soon starts losing her sanity as her husband visits her less and less due to his work. Perhaps the husband was insensitive to her needs. The narrator continues to write in the journal and constantly talks about the yellow wallpaper as she loses her sanity.

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“Finding A Voice: In “The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story based on a woman shown to have a mental illness that keeps deteriorating that can be traced back to her complicated marriage. The story revolves around who she needs to be and what her role should be in this complicated marriage. The narrator describes this “yellow wallpaper” as frightening and represents something musty and rotten in a way. This color, which is “yellow”, is described to be “a smouldering unclean yellow” which is “strangely faded by slow-turning sunlight.” The way she described yellow was the same thing she thought of describing how her marriage was.

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The wallpaper initially appears as a mere aesthetic detail in the room where the narrator is confined. However, as the story progresses, the wallpaper takes on a deeper significance, becoming a symbol of the narrator's oppression and confinement. The narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, spending hours analyzing its patterns and finding disturbing images within

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” follows an unnamed woman as she struggles with an unspecified mental illness. The narrator and her husband, John, temporarily move to a colonial mansion. While there, the narrator becomes increasingly more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that covers her bedroom. This obsession increasingly grows until she eventually breaks down at the end of the story. However, while the narrator is struggling with her mental illness, John brushes it off, continually saying that nothing is wrong with the narrator.

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After being confined to the upper room, the narrator begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper and conjure up of the idea that there is an imprisoned woman behind the wallpaper waiting to be freed. The narrator seems to relate to the woman behind the wallpaper as she feels as though she is imprisoned also. The narrator becomes plagued by the woman behind the wallpaper and she begins to peel off all of the wallpaper to free the woman. She starts crawling around the room and the narrator is convinced that she is trapped and was once herself in the wallpaper. The narrator’s descent into complete madness escalates and the narrator is creeping along the walls of the room and her husband arrives.

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"The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a short story with themes of gender inequality, oppression, and mental health that still affect countless individuals today. It is about a woman who is confined to her room by her husband, a physician, as he attempts to "treat" her issues by taking away all of the control she has in her life. As her mental condiiton worsens she begins to see a pattern in the wallpaper of the room and has hallucinations of it being a living creature, a woman trying to escape the walls. This causes her delusions to become even more drastic and severe as she starts to tell herself that the way to free herself is by freeing the woman in the walls. The story has many themes, however, some of the more prominent ones would be both mental disorders as well as the constant oppression of women.

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(2). She goes on to discuss it in great detail and with passionate hatred. However, it is not until later in the story that it begins to wear her down and pave the way to further insanity. The narrator begins each new section of writing discussing normal daily life and what is happening, but always ends up bringing the topic around to the wallpaper, at first to speak about how much she despises it, and later to comment on how she does not hate it so much anymore, and finally speaking of how she is fascinated by it. A quote from further on in the short story that marks the narrator’s changing opinion of the wallpaper is when she writes “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be….

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In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it shows a story about a woman struggling with depression and suffering. This story helps show readers what silencing women can do to them. Her brother and husband, both are physicians and believe they know what's best for her, which is isolating her and convincing her she is not sick. She is convinced by them even though she does not agree with what they are saying. She tries to reach out to her husband, but convinces her that she needs to rest.

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She starts ripping the wallpaper off the walls and as her husband walks in to the disaster, he faints. The narrator pays no attention to her husband on the ground. The narrator wants to set the women free from the paper just like the narrator wants to be set free from her husband’s rules. Her husband makes it impossible for her to show her emotions and express how her feelings to him because he thinks it is just her sickness talking. He wants full control over his wife’s life, so he uses her sickness as an excuse to tell her what to do.

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But because her husband will not change it and laughs at her for not liking it, she feels trapped and unable to express her wants within the house. Which leads to her just ripping the wallpaper off the wall to finally free her mind and have peace. Throughout the story, Gilman uses repetition to show how trapped the wife feels by her husband. she continuously uses phrases like “what am I to do”.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 to convey the thoughts of a troubled woman trapped in a male dominated world. Women in the nineteenth century were faced with patriarchal oppression and many characteristics of the story gives the reader an inside view of what it was like as a woman living in this time period. The men in this era of patriarchy treated women as if they were inferior and tried to exert their dominance over them whenever possible. The women couldn’t do anything and were forced to accept what their husbands said as the final say. The power of men over women can be seen in the beginning of the story were the narrator is writing in her journal and says that she could’ve been healed faster if it wasn’t

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