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Comparing The Bell Jar And The Yellow Wallpaper

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Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel ‘The Bell Jar’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ both feature a female protagonist that experiences a provoked descent into madness and hysteria as a result of the prolonged and unjust treatment of women situated in a society dominated by the male authority figure. This societal oppression is a proven factor in the deterioration of the mental and physical health of both protagonists and therefore impacts their lives as well as the choices they make. Plath’s The Bell Jar can be seen as a bildungsroman tale of the young Esther Greenwood, entering college in New York in the early 1950s. Esther’s dreams of becoming a professional writer and desire for sexual exploration outweigh her
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By challenging conventional expectations and playing with the readers perceptions, Dahl is able to display erratic human nature and the unforeseen consequences of our actions. Through the themes of betrayal and the challenges of marriage with the reversal of gender roles Dahl creates a compelling narrative that leaves them both shocked and entertained. “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores themes of manipulation and mental illness as well as similar gender role themes. By inviting readers into the mind of a woman confined by societal expectations, Gilman sparks a vital conversation about the importance self expression, and empathy. Both short stories engage the readers in great, yet unique ways however both encourage the reader to revaluate their own roles in society and advocate for greater understanding, compassion, and

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1166 Words | 5 Pages

“Trifles” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are early 20th century short stories that depict women’s suppressive role in society and the belief that women should be treated as subservient and substandard to men. Authors Susan Glaspell (“Trifles”) and Charlotte Anna Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”) are both known for advocating feminism in their works of literature. “Trifles” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” exploit patriarchal dominance and its effect on suppressing women’s intellectual and societal equality. In each short story, the woman protagonist is depicted as trapped in her marriage.

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650 Words | 3 Pages

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end.

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1112 Words | 5 Pages

In Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she tells a horrific ghost story about symptoms of the rest cure. The “rest cure” was a treatment developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who restricted women of intellectual stimuli and condemned them to a domestic life to help their postpartum recovery. After being a victim of this treatment, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Careful attention to the use of Gilman’s symbols in her short story allows the reader to analyze some of the themes concerning feminism and societal misogyny. Foreshadowing throughout, Gilman uses the house, the writing, and the wallpaper as symbols to show how man’s use of the “rest cure” limit women in society and offers that the solution to this issue is to persistently tear away at man’s injustice.

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625 Words | 3 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story that deals with the concepts of madness and gender inequality. The narrator in the story is a suppressed woman who is trapped in a small room as part of the treatment of her illness. She is unable to write or take care of her baby as a good and healthy mother can. The narrator, who suffers from a mental illness and resents gender inequality as well as her inability to express herself, is a vehicle through which Gilman criticizes mainstream opinions and closemindedness regarding these issues through the use of symbolism and imagery.

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549 Words | 3 Pages

There once was a little girl, she had long hair and big eyes; and she loved to play outside in the dirt. At the age of six her mother told her to go inside and play with the dolls, that she would get hurt playing outside. Society taught her that a woman’s job was to take care of a family and raise children of her own one day; she was taught the world was not a place for her. Despite the instilling of this message in many girls, few managed to speak out against it; one of these few was Sylvia Plath. In Sylvia Plath’s work, her deeply rooted emotions and resistance to authority often led people to perceive her as pompous.

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1122 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.

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709 Words | 3 Pages

Connie and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are both vulnerable and victims of circumstance. The narrator is an accurate representation of the typical treatment of women at the beginning of the 20th century, the confinement and repression she

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464 Words | 2 Pages

Susan S. Lanser’s “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the politics of color in America” examines the impacts “The Yellow Wallpaper” had on feminist writing styles and critiques. Lanser writes that the story helps to analyze the reading trough “the lens of a female consciousness” and apply the knowledge gained from a female perspective onto other literature (418). The transition that the narrator displays from being dependent on John to becoming independent reflects the feminist movement and challenges the “male dominance” that currently takes precedence in society (418). The “patriarchal prisonhouse” that is society controls the narrator and oppresses women not only in “The Yellow Wallpaper” but in real life as well (419). The

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1480 Words | 6 Pages

Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period.

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452 Words | 2 Pages

Treatment of women in the 1900s was a really cruel time in history for women, and some short stories that are based on cruelty of women are “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about this women that is really sick and her husband is a doctor and doesn 't believe she is sick, so until she gets better she has to stay inside and can not express her feeling to him so she writes her feelings down in a journal. To begin, In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” In the beginning of the story she was expressing her feelings and saying how her husband is a doctor and believes that she is not sick and won 't take her into the doctor to get treated.

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562 Words | 3 Pages

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.

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1155 Words | 5 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high

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573 Words | 3 Pages

To capture the reader’s attention Charlotte Gilman uses a short story demonstration fear and insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Gilman uses imagery to illustrate how a limited role of a female in society can drive her insane. The house portrays the narrator's isolation.

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900 Words | 4 Pages

Throughout short fiction, Charlotte Gilman is most famously noted for her ability to create strong gothic themes in her writing. This is especially true in her 1890s story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Overall, an important theme in Charlotte Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that when combined, isolation and oppression often lead to negative consequences such as insanity and mental instability. Gilman achieves this through her thorough use of symbolism and settings that helps to highlight and establish the overall theme.

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