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Gothic Elements In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Gothic Horror is a unique style of writing that is “characterized by elements such as fear and death along with romantic themes such as nature, individuality, and extreme emotion” while realism is a writing style that “presents the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short, horror-filled story that vividly describes the mentally ill narrator’s experiences and emotional struggles of loneliness, anxiety, and uneasiness while being locked in a hideous room by herself for a long period of time. The story is definitely an example of realism, but the gothic horror writing style powerfully presents itself throughout the text with the use of eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpapered room, the narrator's …show more content…

Throughout the story, you start to notice that the narrator starts to become clinically insane as she develops childlike behavior such as demolishing the yellow wallpaper and biting some of the old nailed down furniture. The reader is able to tell how hysterical the narrator is getting as she describes how violently she starts to act towards the end of the story. Even the way the narrator starts to describe her dark thoughts and self-opinions show dangerous signs of how her mental health had gone downhill. “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.”(Gilman 801) Her transformation from being able to have self-control to eventually growing clinically insane correlates to characterizations such as horror, madness, and fear that are expressed in the writing styles of gothic

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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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Insanity is a deranged state of the mind. Not everyone has the same experiences nor the same symptoms which lead to their mental disorder. In her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a peculiar case of insanity. The main character is put on bed rest to overcome her temporary nervous depression. However, while being stuck inside the room, the unreliable narrator increasingly becomes more and more symptomatic.

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The heavy bedstead, which was nailed to the ground, was another feature that represents the room as a jail cell. Therefore, the room that she is prisoned shows how the madness benefited her to gain control and achieve a way to escape her confinement. In conclusion, the diverse literature 's do share a common theme that shows women fighting to overcome societal expectations due to the female gender not valued as thinkers capable of being their equals and mental illness can be caused by society’s stereotypical

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It is a story that could actually happen. In the story, Jane expresses concerns about her mental health to her husband, John, a doctor, who through good intentions and believing that he is doing the right thing, requires that his wife stays in bed all the time, and not do any of the things she would normally or would like to do. Due to being bed ridden, Jane becomes worse until she reached the limit and goes crazy. John’s behavior and decisions at this time were considered to be completely normal. The Yellow Wallpaper is considered to fall in the genre of realism because it represents the way life was for women during the nineteenth century.

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Especially, for the sake of her health, she cannot read or write, which is the favorite thing of her, even she thinks that reading and writing is helpful to her health, but her husband forbids it. The yellow wallpaper of this room so attracted her that she becomes insane at last. In this book, Gilman mostly illustrate how the woman’s lack of freedom both in their mental and emotional in the patriarchal society. The husband in the book is a doctor, but he cannot treat his wife, even make her insane by his fault rest cure treatment. As for the heroine, the wife in the book, maybe become insane is also a

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Due to this, darkness has been imbedded with the connotation of fear, death, and evil. However, Charlotte Gilman takes a different approach in her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". She shows that darkness can not only take on the aspect of fear, but it gives us a certain freedom we are not allowed in daylight. It has the power to distort our vision and change perceptions. Her story is about the obsessiveness of a depressed woman to aged yellow paper in her bedroom.

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What exactly defines one as “insane” versus “sane”, and where is the boundary between the two? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores exactly that: the short story initially seems to be a tale of a 19th century woman forced into the notorious rest cure popularized at the time by male doctors--however, as the plot progresses, it becomes a much deeper commentary not only on societal limitations imposed on women, but also on the blurred line separating sanity from insanity. Gilman explores the boundary between sanity and insanity with the usage of different literary elements; she expresses how the boundary is “paper-thin” through the usage of symbolism, shows the subtle conversion to insanity by utilizing a stream of consciousness

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Modern artists today generally use images of physical and mental illness in literature. In The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, both short stories show the usage of illness, madness, and fear. The narrators in both stories try to convince the readers that the characters are physically and mentally ill. Edgar Allen Poe creates these vivid characters which successfully assist the building of plot and ideas. Poe demonstrates how a person’s inner turmoil and terror can lead to insanity through illustrative language.

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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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Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

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Psychoanalytic reading of The Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the speaker seems to be suffering from postpartum depression or "temporary nervous depression." (648). Accordingly, her husband makes the decision for her and takes her to a country house because he believes that it would be good for her. The narrator is not allowed to take care of her own child as she was imprisoned in her room where she should do nothing but "rest."

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How she describes her surroundings and her interactions with her family evolves as her condition worsens. By the end, the reader can truly see just how far gone the narrator has gone. The narrator’s fixation on the yellow wallpaper had gone from a slight obsession to full mental breakdown. As it is with most good stories, the presence of strong symbolism and detailed settings is a very important aspect of the story that helps to draw the reader into the story.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.

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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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The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.

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