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Examples Of Realism In The Yellow Wallpaper

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“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”- Jean Cocteau. The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a very compelling realism story, but what is realism? Realism is a type of storytelling that occurred in 1814 after romanticism. This movement was formed to reject the ideas of romanticism and show people the true world. It is realism because it shows issues from the real world without including supernatural elements.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a wife whose husband John is also her doctor, so when she starts to feel insane John locks her in a house. This made sense for the time period since there was no real doctors/medicine. He decides to lock her into a single room with yellow wallpaper and not let her out. This room gave her an eerie mood, it had bars on the windows and ripped wallpaper, but for the …show more content…

The three prominent examples are the act of locking her into a single room by her husband, her journal, and ripping up the wallpaper. Her being entrapped into a single room by her husband symbolizes how women were trapped in marriages. The wife would often say things like, “but John would not hear of it,” and, “John thought it might do me good…” These statements show how during this time period men had all of the control. The other example is her hidden journal that her husband forbade, “There comes John, and I must put this away, -he hates to have me write a word,” The wife says. This quote shows her lack of freedom because her husband doesn’t want her to be able to write which is her form of expression. Finally, her ripping up the wallpaper shows us her trying to take back her freedom from John. “ ‘ I've got out at last,’ “ said I, “ ‘in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!’ “ This shows the main character's escape from being

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The yellow wallpaper soon becomes sickening to the narrator which is expressed by, “it is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it!” (Gilman). Yellow is normally used to symbolize hope or positive thoughts which the narrator is unable to obtain due to the fact of being confined in the room. As time passes, the narrator becomes more and more obsessed with the wallpaper even believing there are people living inside which symbolize how she feels trapped and helpless.

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She decides that it would be the best to rip down the wallpaper to free the woman so she tears most of it off and creeps around her room. She fully loses her sanity. The ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” should not have been a surprise because of the foreshadowing: descriptions of the room’s destruction, references to the narrator’s mental condition, and her changing attitude toward the wallpaper. One way the author foreshadows that the narrator is becoming mentally unstable is by describing the room’s deteriorating condition. Toward the beginning of the story the narrator feels as if the room is “a big, airy room.. with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore” (par. 31).

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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 nineteenth century was a breeding ground for many literary movements, including realism, romanticism and naturalism. Realism consists of literature that is consistent, predictable, and sticks to the “simple truth” of how regular people live and talk. Romanticism is literature that contains things of intellect, strangeness and remoteness and tries to make the familiar unfamiliar. Finally, naturalism is literature that has regular people in extraordinary circumstances; the hero is at the mercy of larger social and natural forces, which are cruelly indifferent; traces of social Darwinism can be found in the literature and there is generally a brutal struggle for survival. Realism can be seen in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

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Then after this she kinda just went beyond crazy. “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.” She wanted the woman in the yellow wallpaper to escape so she helped her out. Because her husband traumatized her she was always nervous and emotional.

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(Perkins Gilman 13). Jane hallucinates so badly and makes her think she was trapped behind the wall. She finally fully accepts that she's the woman in the wallpaper. When John got home he went to go talk to Jane, ‘“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And i've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!”’

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The woman was going crazy in her own world as she saw something coming out the yellow wall. The wallpaper had a bright yellow color that drove the narrator crazy and tried to peel it down. The woman was fighting with her mental illness as she explains her influence of her personal life, a woman’s right, and her mental illness. A woman in the early 20th century wrote a story, her story was heard about her mental illness and she had no type of support. The narrator of the story “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” says, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Gilman

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She begins to see strangles heads in the wallpaper, which can be a symbolic representation of the patriarchal order that stifled women. The bars on the wallpaper that cage the imaginary women are a reflection of her own situation where she is confined in the old mansion. Even the smell of the wallpaper, which she describes as being ‘yellow’ and present throughout the house, is a reflection of the mental repression that is always present in her life. She is so consumed by the smell that she thinks about burning the old mansion just to cover it

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She is afraid to so much as glance towards them because she knows that there are additional downtrodden women like her in this world. She is in love with the wallpaper considering that it has taken onto such a significant function in her life, however as the plot develops, she begins to detest it due to how it has affected her psychological health. She uses the act of tearing down the wallpaper to liberate herself as The wallpaper serves as a visual representation of the home life that American women had expected to adhere to in the late 19th century. The writer's notebook serves as a metaphor for a female's liberation against social expectations and an inability to articulate herself.. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the author claims, "I sometimes imagine that if I were only well enough to write a bit, it would ease the strain of thoughts and rest me."

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female narrator is greatly troubled by the suppression of her imagination by her husband and her ultimate isolation due to this subordination. These feelings are reflected through the author’s use of setting as the narrator’s dreary and malicious descriptions of the house and the wallpaper mirrors her emotional position. Throughout the reading, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s in-depth loss of touch with reality as she sinks further and further into her own reality. As she becomes more isolated, her descriptions of the house become more abstract as she begins to focus on the wallpaper and starts to see herself as being hidden behind it.

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However, we later see a shift in her feelings towards the wallpaper as she states that she is growing “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” and comes to a realization that it may be “because of the wallpaper” (Par 94) As her opinions on the wallpaper begin to change, the progression of her mental instability becomes increasing visible. She begins to build a relationship with the wallpaper and claims that “There are things in that paper that nobody knows about” (Par 22) her. As this relationship with the wallpaper builds, her sanity begins to slip, and the hallucinations begin in a somewhat minor manor. In her first mention of “the woman” she says that the pattern on the

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Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

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