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Literary analysis of the yellow wallpaper by charlotte perkins
Literary analysis of the yellow wallpaper by charlotte perkins
Literary analysis of the yellow wallpaper by charlotte perkins
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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.
She begins to find the wallpaper therapeutic and feels as if it might be helping her illness. Jane later exclaims, “…I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself” (317)! She continues to write that the pattern in the wallpaper “…becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind is as plain as can be… I am quite sure it is a woman” (316). Although she believes the wallpaper is helping her win her mental battle, keeping what she sees in the wallpaper to herself is causing her condition to spiral out of control.
The woman in the wallpaper is trapped just like she is. The narrator creates a figure that she could relate to and then spends all her time focused on the figure and trying to figure out how to help the woman in the wallpaper escape her cell. As the story continues and she remains isolated, it is obvious Jane views herself as the woman inside the wallpaper. As a result of being trapped in her room, she begins to lose her sanity. She believes she is trapped in the wallpaper and must escape its holds.
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.
I preferred to interpret “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an autobiographical account of a mental breakdown. You can see throughout the story the gradual deterioration of Jane’s sanity. Jane is depressed to begin with and her husband, John, is treating it by locking her in a room by herself. This helps add to her stress and begins to drive her mad. Furthermore, there were several signs throughout the story that signaled that Jane was going crazy.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells us a story of a woman who at the hands of a patriarchal society went insane. Jane is a woman who is being told by her husband and brother that she needs to have treatment for her health. They want her to do the rest cure where she does nothing but rest. Jane does as they say since they’re physicians and men while she’s just a woman living in a male-dominated society. This type of treatment and her life being controlled by the men in her life eventually would lead to her mental health deteriorating.
Then after this she kinda just went beyond crazy. “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And i’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can 't put me back.” She wanted the woman in the yellow wallpaper to escape so she helped her out. Because her husband traumatized her she was always nervous and emotional.
The title and main subject of the story itself “the yellow wall-paper” plays a double role in the text. On one hand, the wallpaper traps the narrator’s mind to it with the intricacy of pattern that leads her to no satisfying end and towards the woman in the wallpaper. On the other hand it also sets her mind free. She describes the wallpaper as being the worst thing she has ever seen: "the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sun” (Stetson 649). Within the wallpaper the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual freedom.
This causes her illness to get progressively worse, and starts the writing of her secret journal in which she writes about the house until she is interrupted by John. The narrator then sneaks the journal again and writes that her family had just visited and left her tired. After this, her writing becomes obsessive with the yellow wallpaper and she writes that she sees a sub-pattern within the wallpaper. She says this pattern is a woman stooping down and creeping around the room. The narrator then goes to the point of ripping wallpaper off the wall to release the woman and when her husband comes in through the locked door, he sees her condition and faints so the narrator has to “creep over him every time”
This differs greatly from Jane, who begins to sympathize with the plight of all domestic women through her experience with the woman behind the yellow wallpaper. Although she initially frowned upon the woman’s efforts to escape, the more her mental health deteriorated, the more she began to relate her plight to that of the trapped woman, both prisoners desperate for escape. With her newfound revelation, she sought to save the trapped woman from her prison, subconsciously freeing herself in the process. “As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her…I wonder if they all came out of that wallpaper as I did?… “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane!
The wallpaper and women behind the paper become metaphoric for their marriage as the women “get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down and make their eyes white (Gilman 370)!” Jane drowned in her marriage as John directed her in all aspects in life, that cut off her air supply to forever become a floating figure in her ocean of life. She struggled with the stifled freedom of expression by not being able to express her troubles due to her marriage, therefore her actions
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is unreliable because she is unaware who she is and why she is in the room. “‘I’ve got out at last,’said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’”(Perkins Gilman 12). The narrator does not know who she is and refers to herself in the third person as Jane. she is also unaware that she was not stuck behind the wallpaper which most people would know is impossible.
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.
She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in an effort to open the public’s eyes to the unfairness of this treatment. By infusing Jane’s narrative with childish language and actions without ever actually calling “Jane” by her name, Gilman creates a universal experience any woman of the time could insert herself into. This allowed women to fully realize the injustice they faced. John’s belittlement of Jane also serves to create both a universal and eye opening experience for the women reading it. Additionally, for those who were willing to read into the symbolism, the nursery and the meaning underlying it added to the injustice Gilman conveys.
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
