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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

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A World of External Silence with an Audible Mind As someone who personally struggled with mental illness, author Shannon L. Alder quotes, “Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” People may recall when they have been rejected by close acquaintances, but the true, shocking memories are those of rejection from friends and family. These issues strike the most in people because they try to live a fulfilling life to please friends and family, while inside, they are the ones suffering. A society that is split between equality and destruction leads to a deranged world in themselves. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator shares a common connection, one of entrapment and disillusionment, …show more content…

As the mirror views the empty room, the woman meditates on the wall across that is so familiar, due to remaining in the same place for too long, that she describes it as “part of my heart” (Plath, 1961). The woman has been through the uneventful years and sees her reflection as an old woman growing older who has “drowned a young girl in the mirror” (Plath, 1961). As each, the narrator and the woman in “Mirror”, have been trapped in themselves, the main stage they encounter is a disillusionment of …show more content…

Feeling excluded by society and loved ones would obviously lead to a downfall even in a small way. Both the woman and the narrator see themselves as a disruption to others lives and they concluded they are not worthy of living a satisfactory life. Although Plath and Gilman both committed suicide, their legacies live with their stories and continue to analyze the truth behind mental illness and the obligation to show its importance in the past and present

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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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The poet successfully illustrates the magnitude with which this disease can change its victim’s perspective about things and situations once familiar to

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In literature, an author’s life experiences are often reflected in their writing. Likewise, the environment and time period of an author, plays a crucial role in the development of their stories. Many cultural, historical and political references are made in literary works. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects upon her own struggles, along with the struggles that women faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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Melinda started to remove or cover any mirror she could. “The first thing to go is the mirror. It is screwed to the wall, so I cover it with a poster of Maya Angelou that the librarian gave me.” (50). Melinda was too disgusted to face herself.

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Gilman also highlights a lack of identity of the narrator through the setting of the novella which reflects the narrator’s societal confinement. The protagonist is surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, which create a sense of separation that the narrator feels from others and the outside world. In addition, the room in which she is confined contains a “heavy bedstead, and… barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on”. These physical and ‘prison-like’ restrictions imposed on the protagonist clearly demonstrate her lack of freedom. Additionally, Gilman’s use of syndetic listing to describe the narrator’s physical entrapment is perhaps reflective of her feelings of suffocation and her inability to escape as the list feels never ending.

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Ultimately resulting in her death. In Margaret Atwood’s short story, she asserts that being discriminated and isolated causes the narrator to have deep mental issues that lead to signs of depression through the protagonist’s unorthodox way of accepting her fate without any hesitation to prevent her life being taken away. In this story, the narrator has been lead to believe that she has no part in her community. Throughout her life, she has been isolated by her entire town even by those who she called family.

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She then entered the controversial treatment in a sanitarium in philadelphia” (Gilman Society). The biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the hard times she had to go through. The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about what she went through. She went to a sanitarium just like

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The words “mental breakdown” instill discomfort and fear in the human heart, but what is more chill inducing is just how easily such a mental state can consume someone. Humans like to believe they are the masters of their world, yet the fragility of their measly and overly complex minds leads to a quick recession. It is not long before small stresses such as societal pressures, school, work, and jobs create a large crack in a person’s perception of life. Just a few minute burdens can make a tremendous effect. In The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger exemplifies how loneliness, the transition from childhood to adulthood and mental illness lead to mental deterioration through Holden Caufield.

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The repressed self is released out by detaching from reality. This detachment allows her to be free from social norms as her madness now allows her to no longer conform to cultural bounds. Her final protest, thus, comes out in the form of insanity. She can now escape from the cage of her husband by refusing to accept her identity as a repressed woman. This text thus brings to focus the dark theme that cultural and social expectations of women are so rigid that the protagonist has to give up her identity as a sane woman to finally achieve the freedom she is denied through

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The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”

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My mom’s advice of hearing multiple sides of a story has become very influential in my day to day life as well as my approach to literature. The practice of considering multiple sides of a story becomes critical when reading novels written in the first person point of view. In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, we are only

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Illness and Love To live with a mental illness is not as bad as living with someone who is suffering from a mental illness. Both of the protagonists of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind suffer a mental illness, Alzheimer’s Disease and Schizophrenia. The problems that the protagonists’ face in their daily life, not only affects themselves but puts their loved ones in an uncomfortable situation. Mental illness impacts every aspect of an individual’s life and leaves a calamitous imprint on the lives of everyone involved.

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814 Words | 4 Pages

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.

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1106 Words | 5 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, Jane, has postpartum depression. In order to cure this depression, John, Jane’s husband and a doctor, administer the rest treatment on her. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her personal experience. Along with writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” she wrote an explanation for why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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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’”

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