Compare And Contrast How To Read Literature Like A Madman

The “Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It depicts a woman in a summer estate with her husband and her slow mental deterioration. It's written in a diary format where the author keeps a journal that she must keep hidden from her husband who is also her psychiatrist. The reason for this is she must not use her mind any more than she must. The story starts out where she is an obviously mentally bothered person. When the story ends, she has gone totally mad. The book How to Read Literature Like a Professor illustrates many of the literary techniques Yellow Wallpaper used, these being where the short story might have drawn inspiration from or the

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor the author states,” you can go looking for old friends and asking the attendant question: "now where have I seen her before?” (Foster 24). Many authors have used a mentally troubled unreliable character as the narrator for their stories. One story I have read stuck out to me as being similar to yellow wallpaper and where Perkins drew inspiration. “The Diary of a Madman” (1835), by Nikolai Gogol tells of a low-level clerk who is mentally challenged. He keeps a diary and writes in it everyday encounters. He starts the story by hearing dogs speaking to each other and ends in him believing he is king of Spain and the mental hospital is Spain. As the story progressed his mental health worsened. Near the end of the yellow wallpaper the narrator says “I don't like to look out of the windows even - there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” (Gilman 656). At this point in the story, she has gone insane. Not only do the two stories share plot structure, but the narrators also both keep diaries and are

Foster states “that thinks about human problems, including those in the social and political realm, that addresses the rights of persons and wrongs of those in power,” (Foster 117). Foster is explaining stories may have political undertones that are hard to pick up but add much value to a story. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman underlyingly questions, the position of women in the institution of marriage. Throughout the book John (the narrator's husband) had a demeaning tone when he would talk to his wife. He would often talk to her like she was a second-class citizen not deserving of respect, “I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with. him the other day and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.” (Gilman 651). John is in control of her every move and because of his patronizing attitude he misjudges his wife and hurts her mental health even more. She should be able to stand up for herself without crying in fear of her own disloyalty to her husband. Because the narrator cannot do anything she goes beyond reality and dives deeper into her