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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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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. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”(226) So Jane believes Johns methods won’t work with helping her. …show more content…

She has minimum social interactions and her husband goes away every so often to lecture in different places leaving Jane behind. And he dismisses her concerns about her condition and doesn't really listen to her. As time goes on Jane becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper in her room, and starts seeing a woman in a yellow dress crawling outside the house and eventually believes that woman is stuck on the other side of the yellow wallpaper and one day while John is away Jane locks herself up in the room and starts tearing the wallpaper off so she can “free” the woman behind it and then starts creeping along the wall and starts saying she won’t ever leave that room. And when John gets home he’s telling jane to open the door, but Jane just simply tells him where the key is, and eventually John breaks the door and sees Jane creeping around and he faints, but Jane simply starts creeping over him. As we can see when Jane was forced to be a situation she didn't want to be she became an entirely different

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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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Gilman intentionally tried to make Jane a typical woman of the time period. She is economically dependent on her husband, as she does not work out of the house. She is not allowed to make her own decisions, John will not let her out of bed, even though she wishes to do so; and she is often treated like a child, John gives her a dirty look when she expresses that she is still not well when he believes that she is getting

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I preferred to interpret “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an autobiographical account of a mental breakdown. You can see throughout the story the gradual deterioration of Jane’s sanity. Jane is depressed to begin with and her husband, John, is treating it by locking her in a room by herself. This helps add to her stress and begins to drive her mad. Furthermore, there were several signs throughout the story that signaled that Jane was going crazy.

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After Jane’s traumatizing experiences with being locked away, rather than being frightened for the rest of her life, she became angry at the discriminatory actions of her aunt: “No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.” (Chapter 3). Jane’s time spent in the red-room symbolizes Jane overcoming her struggle to gain freedom and independence. Her experiences in the room show how she overcomes the initial fear of the dark and ghosts, just as she defeats the feeling of being deficient; becoming more independent and passionate about her decisions and feelings. Although there were never “severe or prolonged bodily illnesses”, Jane states that she was in fear for a good amount of time after the “incident”, which leave a long lasting impression on someone as passionate as

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Although Jane displays qualities which lead us to believing that she is becoming more independent, her hysteria causes us to see a lack of agency within her character. Ultimately, her hysteria causes her to return to the domestic sphere, which can be critiqued by analyst Carmel L. Morse. Towards the end of the story, Jane makes the decision to call her father and ask for his help: " But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called up her father in the city" (57). By relying on the male figure for help, this is an act of agency.

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Early on in the story, Jane is instructed by her husband John, who is a physician, to partake in the Rest Cure. The treatment is aimed at improving ones overall health by isolating them from any form of stress by encouraging the user to do absolutely nothing. Due to this treatment being implemented on Jane, many social and psychological changes are seen morphing into something much worse than what she originally started with. Consequently, Jane slowly begins to lose all trace of sanity. She is not taken seriously.

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However, from the very start Jane is weary of the house and declares it as “haunted” and that there is “something queer about it” (Gilman). Even though she describes some parts of the house as beautiful, it becomes a dreadful place where she is transformed and becomes more mentally unstable. She is trapped inside and because of this and the fact that her husband will not let her do anything, she becomes unstable and insane. The most important aspect of the house would be the yellow wallpaper. She, herself is trapped inside the room and the only thing she has that allows her to escape is the wallpaper.

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On the last day of their stay, John walks in on the narrator crawling around the room, and she declares “I’ve got out at last’... ’in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”. John faints, and the narrator continues to crawl around the room over his body. This story was tricky to figure out, nevertheless, upon further inspection it becomes clear that the wallpaper was a symbol of the guilt that plagued the narrator, or Jane, for not being able to fit the role of a traditional housewife.

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The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a wife who is confined to a room due to a condition such as depression or anxiety. The woman does all she can, to get rid of her sickness, still she still is not allowed to work. She speaks about how she controls her temper towards her husband John with pills, despite they make her tired she tries to find new excitements. The pills she takes for her to control emotions tire her greatly. She then walks into the old house writing about the horrid color on the wall, But then when John visits her in her room, she must not write about it, she hides her book she was writing on.

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In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is put on rest cure for her depression and it eventually leads to her mental collapse due to feeling isolated and trapped in her room. It all began when she saw the yellow wallpaper in the room that was to be her prison. At first, she just despises its color and pattern but the longer she has to stare at it the paper starts to move and eventually someone appears behind the bar-like paper. At the end of the story she sees many women who came from the wallpaper and wonders “if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”(Gillman 474). She believes that she was the one behind the wallpaper and is now free.

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Learning Journal Unit 6 Short Story: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Source: “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper” by Catherine J. Golden. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman explores the oppressive nature of gender roles during the late 19th century.

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The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman proves that women were treated poorly before the 20th century, and that in their marriages they had no say, and were considered inferior to their husbands. This paper will analyze Gilman’s short story from the perspective of a depressed woman in the late 18th century to the early 19th century. Before the 20th century women were treated poorly, we can see this in Gilman’s text, “.... he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (56)

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While women are held to a much more fair standard than in the recent past, women have always suffered from a perceived inferiority as shown in the texts, The Yellow Wallpaper and If I were a Man, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Patriarchal institutions and social relations are responsible for the inferior or secondary status of women therefore, patriarchal society gives absolute priority to men and to some extent limits women's human rights. Feminists use the term patriarchy to describe the power relationship between men and women as well as to find out the root cause of womens subordination. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story published in 1892 and is regarded as an important work of American feminist literature.

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Jane sees a lot of trickery and abuse throughout the school. This causes a natural distrust of most of the people she meets. She makes a few friends, but they either leave the school or die of illness, which is another internal conflict that she has

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After a bit more time in the house, she confesses that she spends much of her time alone crying and that the wallpaper is always on her mind. She tries to tell John how she feels but he quickly dismisses her claims stating that she is eating and sleeping better. John believes that just because she is looking better and sleeping more that the rest treatment is working. John treats Jane in a childlike manner making statements such as “ Bless her little heart” and “What is it little girl” (Kennedy and Gioia 473). As the Jane’s mind continues its descent into insanity certain clues recorded in her journal reveal the alarming state of her mind.

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