There are many events that can foreshadow the rest of one’s life for the better, or, for the worst. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane (the narrator) struggles with a mental illness that causes her to become very weak so her husband, John, takes her to a country home to heal. While at the house she stays in a room that has old yellow wallpaper. Jane is deeply disturbed yet highly intrigued and maintains her deep inspections of the wallpaper as she stays there.
The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.
Within The Yellow Wallpaper Jane is confined in a building at the top, which they call a nursery. Jane is confined by her husband who is a Doctor, and her caretaker. During the Victorian Era it was quite common for the husband to take care of their wife, while their wife took care of the house. However, Jane is having a dilemma where she does not believe she is ill, as her husband does not believe her and has her kept in the nursery. Eventually, she starts to hallucinate and starts to see things, perhaps by the hideous yellow wallpaper in the nursery.
The Yellow Wallpaper’s John is the narrator’s husband and doctor, who orders her the “rest cure” in the wake of her “nervous condition” shortly after giving birth. In the beginning, the narrator demonstrates the ways that John belittles her illness and her thoughts in general. For example, after she tells John that she finds the house to be ‘queer’ she writes, “John laughs at me of course, but one expects that in marriage” (792). John also takes to using pet names for his wife throughout the story as another form of belittlement. In one passage, John finds the narrator up in the middle of the night examining the wallpaper: “‘what is it little girl?’
In the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, dramatically changes for Janes behavior has been shown towards the end of the story. On the last night, her husband has once again going in town for attending to a patient, and Jane asks Jennie not to disturb her. As no one know notice Jane, she locks herself in the nursery to allow uninterrupted time for peeling wallpaper and thus freeing the shadowy woman. As Jane was tearing off the paper, she knows that she is closer to be woman who is behind the wall, until the point she loses her sense of personal identity and merges with the woman behind the wallpaper. When the time her husband breaks through the door to find out his wife was crawling amid the torn paper, and proclaiming that the woman behind
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.
Even though The Yellow Wallpaper symbolizes gender norms overall, it puts the perspective of how much authority men have over women and how the women could not handle it mentally. The main character believes she is sick, however, her husband John who is also a physician says she simply has temporary nervous depression (her brother who is also a physician says the same thing.) Within the story, Gilman includes some pieces that hint that John neglects his wife’s feelings such as “I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.” and “And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way— it is such a relief!”
The Yellow Wallpaper is a tragic story in which all the characters have the best intentions to set the narrator free from depression only lead to her psychotic break. The narrator, who is never named, is round and a dynamic character due to the overwhelming mental changes she possess throughout the story. The wife and mother tells her story through her secret journals, revealing the darkness that takes over her mind and leads her to believe she is actually the woman in
When she is moved to the top of the house, she is basically cut off from any communication, Jane becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room because she feels it has life and meaning to it. “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had” (313). Jane becomes emotionally unstable at this point, making her mental condition worse. She becomes more and more convinced that the wallpaper contains a force that threatens the whole
In the story The Yellow Wall Paper, the narrator is suffering from nervous depression. Her husband, John, a physician, believed that her best possible option for treatment was to live in a house that was away from everything for the summer. This house proved to not be as effective as originally thought. The setting of the story, which revolves around the house, specifically the room with the yellow wallpaper, played a large role on the narrator. The house is a secluded estate, and a short distance from nearby village in England.
The opening of “The Yellow Wallpaper” starts out with the woman and her husband in a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate,...a haunted house”(Gilman). The woman then goes on to describe her life with her husband and how her husband does not believe she is truly sick; only having a nervous condition. Since her husband is a physician, she believes him wholeheartedly even saying that she is “...glad my case is not serious!”(Gilman). There her husband forces her to dorm in the old nursery upstairs for her treatment, and there she discovers an old, faded yellow wallpaper. As time starts to pass, the woman has nothing to do because her husband told her to breathe in the clean air and rest as much as she can.
In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane is going insane due to her husband's patriarchy. She is in a room all day with this yellow wallpaper that is driving her insane. She believes that the wallpaper is holding her captive, and eventually tears down the wallpaper. After she gets rid of the wallpaper she believes that she is free, and said that her husband was trying to keep her contained as well. This part in the story is when Jane reaches her breaking point.
In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents how wretchedness is overlooked and changed into blended sentiments that eventually result in a significantly more profound enduring incongruity. The Yellow Wallpaper utilizes striking mental and psychoanalytical symbolism and an effective women's activist message to present a topic of women' have to escape from detainment by their male centric culture. In the story, the narrator's better half adds to the generalization individuals put on the rationally sick as he confines his significant other from social circumstances and keeps her in an isolated house. The narrator it's made out to trust that something isn't right with her and is informed that she experiences some illness by her own significant other John.
At the beginning of the short story Jane absolutely hates the wallpaper in her bedroom, but at the end Jane claims that she is “getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper.” (page ) At the beginning of the story Jane is aggravated at John and after John’s treatment she describes him as “so wise” (page ) and “loving [her] so.” (page ) Throughout the “Yellow Wallpaper” John consistently makes Jane’s condition worse and worse until she finally has a mental breakdown.
In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" author Charlotte Perkins Gillman chooses to make the main character, Jane, a dynamic character. This choice is what makes "The Yellow Wallpaper" a constantly changing story. Towards the beginning of the story, Jane 's attitude is somewhat calm and orderly, even though her stated in
