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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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The historical implications of patriarchal ideas regarding gender led Charlotte Perkins Gilman to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”. During the 1900s, women were excluded from the public sphere and remained subjected to the domestic and private spheres. Women were considered as second-class citizens with virtually no individual rights. It was every woman’s responsibility to fulfill her domestic duties of becoming a mother, and raising her children with a high sense of morality and nationalistic, as well as patriotic values (cite). Because women’s lives revolved only around the domestic sphere many suffered mental issues, or so it was believed. Gilman’s reasons for writing the story were based on her personal life and experiences, specifically the treatments she had …show more content…

The treatments she received from S. Weir Mitchell constituted of rest cure meaning Gilman was prohibited from creative work, and was advised to “live as domestic life as possible [and to] have [her] child with [her] all the time” (Gilman 1935: 821). After a couple of months of following the treatment plan Gilman began to loose her sanity as she recalled her experiences “if I were only well to enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (Gilman 1899). John, Gilman’s husband, took the responsibility of implementing her treatment upon himself. He rented the old ancestral hall, and placed her in the room with instruments constantly reminding her of paraphernalia of solitary confinement and dirty, ripped yellow wallpaper (Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 818). Gilman did not dare to question his judgments, because

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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 Lens Essay #2 In the 19th century women begun to rise up against gender roles and social expectations that have had oppressed women throughout history, women yearned to be just as equal as men. Authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist author during the 19th century, would create characters and stories that would get her message across as shown in one of Gilman’s most famous stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” which touches upon a woman’s mental and physical health as well as the main character’s oppression which holded her back for a long time. The main character from “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses throughout the story how she wishes to break free from all that is holding her back and live the life she has always wanted.

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Despite the ideology of her time, Gilman never resisted expressing her thoughts and feelings through her writing. By the early twentieth century, she had become an extremely influential women’s rights advocate, and author. Contrary to her doctor’s orders, she decided to reflect on her horrible experiences in her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (U.S. National Library of Medicine). At first, Gilman tried to have her story published in The Atlantic Monthly, but the editor declined because the story made him “miserable” (Straub 1). After being rejected, The New England Magazine agreed to publish Gilman’s story.

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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.

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607 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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423 Words | 2 Pages

S. Weir Mitchell. " Gilman undertook a cure which stipulated extended bed rest to be followed by a return to working as a wife and mother. She was never to read for more than two hours a day. Not surprisingly, the cure, far from enabling Gilman to recover her emotional equilibrium, further exacerbated her instability. She almost experienced a mental break down" (“Charlotte Perkins Gilman’’ Authors).

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1721 Words | 7 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story that portrays a very common view of nineteenth century culture and medicine. The story, written in classical fiction form, has a plot, setting, a cast of characters, and a point of view from which the story is told. The way in which the story is told, and the unexpected conclusion, are two of the main reasons why “The Yellow Wallpaper” is such an important piece of nineteenth century fiction. There are few characters in the story; however, each one plays a crucial role in allowing the reader to come to a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the story by allowing the reader insight into the mind of the narrator.

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In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is not a typical upper class young woman, who has just given birth to her first child. She is an inquisitive dynamic young woman, whose nervous condition has gradually gotten worse as she adapts to the restrictions placed upon her. We see how the restrictions transform her through a series of journal entries, and learn that she has a tough time expressing her feelings to others. Through intimate journal entries we see how the protagonist is controlled by a dominating husband, and how she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper.

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Taking Control of the Mind Imagine waking up every day and feeling angry, hopeless, anxious, and not even enjoying the things you do. It would be a life that would be miserable and not even enjoyable. Being depressed is something that is crippling. People have a hard time holding down a job, and even having relationships.

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In the Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist has an internal conflict projected in the yellow wallpaper, causing her to slowly give in to her id, the lady in the wall, and become delirious. Gilman uses Freudian concepts to connect to how the patriarchy causes women to feel trapped by their marriages. Her superego criticizes herself, believing she can’t do anything for her husband, and the ego suppresses her id, while the id relieves her from all her conflicts at the very end.

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What would you do if your partner kept you locked up inside a house to help “fix” your mental illness? Would you be to blame for not leaving or is blame dependent on circumstance? In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an unnamed narrator, later called Jane, is driven to madness by her speculated postpartum depression that was left essentially untreated due to the misogyny that was a norm at the time. In the era this story takes place in (the 1920s), women such as Jane were often given broad diagnoses such as “nervous depression”, which Jane was said to have, and got “treated” through a rest cure. A rest cure would consist of a few nature walks and no work or activity other than that.

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726 Words | 3 Pages

Isolated within a bedroom with nothing to do but analyze the walls, “The Yellow Wallpaper” By Charlotte Gilman illustrates the treatment of womans’ mental health in the early 1900s. This work exhibits the inner monologue of a woman falling into postpartum depression after a miscarriage. Under the control of her manipulative husband Jonn, she is convinced to spend all her time in a run-down bedroom, where the lack of entertainment leaves her to obsess over the wallpaper. Charlotte Gilman uses imagery and sentence structure in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to create an erratic tone.

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864 Words | 4 Pages

Gender Roles, Mental Illness, and Miscommunication: Why The Narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” Could Not Recover With her ability to employ symbolic and thematic elements of vast depth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has constructed an excellent commentary on gender roles and postpartum depression. It is evident that she was able to make waves with her writing in that it is still being used as a discussion piece a century hence. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman employs specific themes to portray the narrator’s conflict regarding the time period’s perception of mental illness, women’s societal and marital roles, and the gravity of miscommunication, particularly as it pertains to medical treatment. To accurately dissect Gilman’s portrayal of the

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709 Words | 3 Pages

Gothic horror and psychological terror are both present in the short tale "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read the first-person account of an unnamed woman's struggle with maternal depression throughout the story. The narrator of the tale gradually loses her mind as she becomes more fixated on the yellow wallpaper in her room. She endures the duration of her three-month stay in a colonial mansion with her physician spouse John and his sister, confined in this room alone, the wallpaper plaguing her throughout her stay.

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1662 Words | 7 Pages

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, various symbols are used to convey the underlying causes that have worsened Jane’s mental state. A key symbol in the story is the wallpaper and the setting. The narrative emphasizes the negative effects of the rest cure, which is “devised by neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell as a treatment for neurasthenia. ”(Science Museum). It is a prevalent therapy for women's mental health problems at the time that frequently required isolating women in their bedrooms and restricting their access to social and intellectual stimulation.

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