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Hallucinations In Ernest Hemingway's The Yellow Wallpaper

1155 Words5 Pages

Imagine a husband that dictates his wife’s every move. He is a respected doctor therefore, his word is the only one that matters. He is the one prescribing her medicine and treatment that will improve her mental health. However, this medicine has not been working and she has gradually become worse without him realizing. Suppressing all of her wants and needs is causing her to spiral out of control and boost her mental instability. The chamber he has chosen for her is not superb. Each and every wall, coated with atrocious wallpaper. Along with the suppression from her husband, the hideous wallpaper causes her to fly off the handle, mentally. Succeeding her question to move rooms, he denies the request on the grounds that it is unacceptable to …show more content…

“It may be more accurate to view the symptoms she develops later in the story-visual hallucinations, delusions, paranoia- as stemming from the birth of their child, was subdued or controlled” (Suess 85). She was sent to a specialist in nervous diseases before coming to the house. Her treatment consisted of “isolation, complete physical rest, a rich diet of creamy food, massage, and electrical stimulation of disused muscles, and complete submission to the authority of the attending physician” (Thrailkill 536). She was then taken from her home and brought to a house that her husband has rented. The house was three miles from the village and had gates that lock (Gilman 609). Her husband had brought her to this house so that her mental health would improve. However, the house that was supposed to help the narrator, caused her symptoms to eventually become worse. The room that the narrator’s husband chose for them to stay in had an atrocious yellow wallpaper that covered each and every wall. The pattern on the wallpaper described the connection between domestic life and the life that [the narrator] lives (Thrailkill 542). Along with the horrid wallpaper, the room had floors with gouges and splinters, and the plaster on the walls was dug out in some places. The windows had bars, supposedly for the children that were there before them (Gilman 610). Although there were bars on the windows and the floors being destroyed, neither had been awful enough to be the worst part of the room. The worst part of the room was the atrocious yellow wallpaper that had a distinguished pattern that would eventually drive the narrator insane. “These distorted figures are not merely metaphors for twisted minds and deformed bodies however; they are catalysts. Just as war “makes” deformed, hysterical men, so the domestic environment materially constitutes women’s minds and bodies; the

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