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Childbirth In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

710 Words3 Pages

Some people might say childbirth is a miracle, but it can cause many changes mentally and physically. The change is shown throughout the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Where the narrator goes insane from being “trapped: in a hideous room that makes her go insane. The husband rips the narrator's baby from her, and tells her she’s not fit to raise a child because of her postpartum depression. Telling her she can’t do any type of “work” in this new home she’s not used to with a hideous wallpaper. She obsesses over this wallpaper so much she eventually goes insane. Throughout the story, Gilman uses symbolism to reveal the theme that people can become mentally unstable without the freedom to express themselves. …show more content…

From being trapped she later becomes insane from doing nothing but being in her own head thinking about the wallpaper for 3 months straight. In one scene, she notices that the pattern is moving because the woman behind the bars shakes it, little does she know it's really her. “The front pattern does move-- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (654). The facts clearly indicate that the narrator is hallucinating from thinking about the wallpaper all the time because she has nothing else to do. She’s becoming more and more crazy. She sees this woman behind the bars in the wallpaper, which symbolizes herself, as trapped in her own mind so long she goes crazy. This is just one example of a symbol to show the narrator going is slowly going …show more content…

So if she gets caught she won’t be able to write anymore, and will go mad even faster. As the narrator writes in her diary, she explains that she doesn’t want to accept the fact that she isn’t okay. Her husband would tell her nothings wrong with her, to not worry, this nervous depression will go away.The only thing that helps is distractions, which is writing for her. She writes,“‘I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!’”(651). Overall, the writer of this story is trying to give hints throughout the story through symbolism to show that someone can become mentally unstable if unable to express

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She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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The narrator is disgusted and repelled by the wallpaper, originally describing the wallpaper as “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin,” but as the story progresses her hatred turns into an obsession. The narrator sees figures with the pattern of the wallpaper and starts to stay up at night to analyze what she is seeing. One definition of madness is “mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it, which her actions can be described as delusional to a normal eye, yet to a “discerning eye” the reader can infer that the figure the narrator describes behind the wallpaper is the narrator herself and her way of expressing how she feels trapped as she states “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get

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The woman in the wallpaper is trapped just like she is. The narrator creates a figure that she could relate to and then spends all her time focused on the figure and trying to figure out how to help the woman in the wallpaper escape her cell. As the story continues and she remains isolated, it is obvious Jane views herself as the woman inside the wallpaper. As a result of being trapped in her room, she begins to lose her sanity. She believes she is trapped in the wallpaper and must escape its holds.

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The Yellow Wallpaper The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, talks about a woman suffering from postpartum depression. The woman knows that she suffers from being depressed but her husband doesn’t believe her. Her husband is a physician, and she says that all she needs is to rest and just stay in a room.

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The Yellow Wallpaper is a story written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, and much depends on personal interpretation. There are many different ways someone can interpret this, but one theory feels more accurate than the others. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman going through postpartum depression, because multiple times throughout the story her baby was specifically mentioned, the setting of the story is where many with postpartum would go, and her husband treats her like she is experiencing it. Throughout the story the narrators baby was mentioned, but in an odd way.

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As the days pass she moves into a creepier, progressively obsessive narrative concerning only the wallpaper, “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will” (Gilman 7). Eventually, the wallpaper starts to change and confuse the narrator as she loses track of what she knows. She writes these thoughts in her journal, “...it is tiresome and perplexing. There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it.

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Instead of focusing on her desperate wants and needs, she digresses into a useless topic that does nothing to help her mental condition. According to John, the narrator “neglect[s] proper self-control[,] so [she] take[s] pains to control [her]self… [it] makes [her] very tired” (1). She realizes that even though her husband cares about her health, the constant need to behave a certain way becomes exhausting. If she were free in her mind, her reality would be much different, and not grueling for no reason.

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As the days go by and the narrator gradually begins to obsess over The Yellow Wallpaper, she has believed to gone more into insanity. What makes The Yellow Wallpaper have

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She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

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“Mental health is not a choice; recovery is (anonymous).” The Yellow Wallpaper is a Southern Gothic short story, by Charlotte Perkins Stetson. In this story, the narrator had unusual, disturbing thoughts. Several would call it a mental illness of some sort. Throughout this Southern Gothic short story, the narrator struggled with post-partum depression, anger management, nervousness, and more.

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It is evident that change is a natural component in the average person’s life. Some however, are more drastic than others. This is exhibited through the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”, who undergoes a drastic change in her health due to postpartum depression, her relationships with the individuals around her, and her isolation. These changes later develop an internal conflict in the form of a troubling identity plight.

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However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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Nonetheless, the narrator continues to pen her ideas about the wallpaper as it transpired from being perplexing to gaining clarity each day. Amidst arriving at a full conclusion of what the wallpaper depicts, the narrator says she sees “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern” (Perkins Gilman, 50). As the days passed,

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Gilman herself suffered from postpartum depression. Gilman was given the rest treatment. She was to stay in bed most of the day and not to write until the day she died. This nearly drove her mad, like Jane, but she manages to escape from this hell. After her escape, she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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