Irony In Ernest Hemingway's The Yellow Wallpaper

The narrator starts writing about how beautiful the place is that she and her husband John are vacationing in. She states that she has a nervous depression and her marriage with John is not good. He believes that she really isn’t too ill at all. Their personalities are conflicting. He says that she must never do any work or write. The narrator believes that to do so would actually benefit her so she secretly writes behind his back and starts feeling much better. The topic of her journal is largely the house. She hates the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. As times passes on she continues to write. She wishes the wallpaper would be changed but John rebuffs her. She begins to imagine things, and concludes that her room was once a nursery. The

The narrator is in a pitiful state, and has visions of a woman behind the wallpaper. She is insane, and believes the house to be disturbed and haunted. She is also melancholy; unable to do anything she wants and misunderstood. “When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Here the author uses the literary technique of irony. Doctors did not understand insanity; it was a relatively new field in medical knowledge. Doctors often ended up making their patients worse. The irony is that doctors are the ones driving their patients mad, and yet this doctor says it is “The Yellow Wallpaper” that is maddening. While it is not really applicable in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or other developed countries, it may be applicable to others where women are not treated with equality and the respect men have. In developing countries there may not be enough knowledge to treat insanity properly. Often insane people, both men and women, suffer in developing countries because of