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Isolation In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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The narrative begins when the narrator and her husband, John, rent a colonial estate for the summer after the wife gives birth to her daughter. John is a doctor; he diagnoses the narrator, who is his wife, with "nervous depression" and prescribes a "rest cure." This prescription includes a strict rest and seclusion routine in a room with yellow wallpaper, which the narrator dislikes from the beginning of the isolation. The rising action in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" follows the narrator's growing passion for the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is trapped. She becomes obsessed with the pattern that made her imagine a lady trapped behind it and wants to free her. This obsession leads to her tearing off the wallpaper …show more content…

Once Gilman has done ripping the paper, she begins to behave like the woman on the wallpaper, sneaking around the room and tracing the pattern on the wall, this was the falling action. The resolution of the story occurs when her husband realizes the seriousness of his wife's mental illness and chooses to move her from the house and seek medical treatment for her. The fact it depicts the negative impacts of a patriarchal society on women's mental health is …show more content…

They do not confront John's dismissive attitude toward the narrator's mental health problems, but rather support the story's gender roles and power dynamics. Furthermore, because the main characters in most stories are round, the wife is the main character in this story. Yet, the secondary characters include John and his sister Jennie, both of whom are flat. When it comes to the story's settings, the place was a big and isolated colonial home, that plays a significant role in generating the narrator's sense of captivity and isolation. The narrator's room is in the attic, emphasizing her isolation from the outer world. The backdrop is also defined by the mansion's dilapidated condition, with peeling wallpaper and damaged floorboards adding to the impression of decay and

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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.

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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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Literary Devices in The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an American novelist, author and feminist. Born July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, she died August 17, 1935 in Pasadena, California. She is best known for her short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper', the story of a young couple, John and Charlotte, who also happen to be new parents. The wife not only suffers from postpartum depression, but she also slowly descends into a state of psychosis due to the yellow wallpaper from her room in the summer house where they were staying. This short story is rich in literary devices such as imagery, symbolism, and personification, which will soon be explored in depth.

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The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is staying at a summer home while her husband renovated their house. This house was also used to be an old nursery. In the nursery she was not allowed to go inside some of the rooms, however the room she stayed in had this yellow wallpaper that she disliked for a while. Her husband, John, also thought it would be a good idea to bring her to this summer house because she was ill. She had postpartum depression and it progressively got worse throughout her two month stay at the summer home.

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In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The narrator develops an uncontrollable obsession with this yellow wallpaper as she is deemed crazy and is confined to a large nursery room where she is constantly being medicated and forced to rest. Throughout the story she writes in her secret journal where in each entry she describes her feelings towards both John and the yellow wallpaper. In the beginning she has a very negative attitude against the wallpaper and is constantly remarking it's horrible markings and it's very shade of color. Throughout the story however, her feelings dramatically change as she starts observing the wallpaper and each mark, and analysing everything from the odor that has spread throughout the house, to the hidden figure trapped behind the wall. Near the end of the story, she starts seeing more and more of the hidden figure and making out details of the trapped woman, but then goes crazy as she sees her crawling around the yard and then believes she is that

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She obsesses over this wallpaper so much she eventually goes insane. Throughout the story, Gilman uses symbolism to reveal the theme that people can become mentally unstable without the freedom to express themselves.

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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.

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In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.

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She is still seeing the woman behind it, and even sees her in various other places around the room. During her last night of sleeping in the house, she becomes very determined to rip off the wallpaper to expose the woman from her hiding place. The narrator goes absolutely bonkers. She "shook and she pulled" (219) the wallpaper from the wall in an attempt to help the woman she is seeing. The wallpaper is torn down overnight, but it is apparent that it was very difficult for the narrator to do so because only a strip is missing from the wall.

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To begin, despite the societal expectations that the room was meant for children, the narrator’s judgment of the room remains unimpeded. In fact, when she first writes about the room, she states, “... I should judge” (Stetson 2), indicating that there is an expectation for her to judge the room, but she refrains from doing so. Her judgment lays with the wallpaper. The narrator sees the wallpaper as the only thing in the room that does not belong to her, as its indecipherable drawings prevent her from making it her own. Causing frustration with this lack of control drives her to tear it down, and in the process, she becomes so angry that she describes herself as being,“enough to do something desperate” (Stetson 9).

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At the beginning of the story, Gilman shows us the wife slowly becoming more interested in the wallpaper. Shortly after she notices it, she becomes obsessed and wants to understand what it means. When she

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It could have been a time of separation, depression, or any kind of struggle that one could face alone or with others. The setup of the house can be portrayed through the reader’s personal vision of that kind of domestic

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The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.

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To be trapped in one's own mind may be the worst prison imaginable. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator of the story is constantly at battle with many different forces, such as John, her husband, the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of her room, and ultimately herself. Throughout the story the narrator further detaches herself from her life and becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in her temporary home, slowly driving her mad. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a major and dynamic character as she is the main character of the story, and throughout the story her personality and ways of thinking change drastically.

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