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Similarities Between The Yellow Wallpaper And The Pit And Pendulum

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Exploring Madness and Imprisonment: A Comparative Study of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Pit and The Pendulum I chose to do a comparison of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe. Both short stories were interesting as well as intriguing to me as they dive into themes of confinement, psychological torment, and the progressive unraveling and deterioration of the human mind. I think I was drawn to these stories because of some of the connections I was making to Covid-19 and the mild feelings accompanied with being confined and feeling myself personally unraveling (although I just casually labeled it as cabin fever). Even Though they have apparent differences in setting, narrative structure …show more content…

I found this to be relevant for me as a woman, and also still current as gender roles are very prominent in my household. The story's protagonist is an unnamed female narrator that is confined to a room by her husband because of her "nervous condition”. As she spends more time in the room, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and gradually descends into madness. I believe that her confinement to the room represents the societal restrictions placed on women during that time (1890’s; submissive, self-sacrificing, obedient, “feminine”), and the yellow wallpaper itself is to be a prominent symbol that signifying’s her confinement, the oppression she was undergoing, along with the mental deterioration she was experiencing. As she becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper we can see her mental state declining as a reflection, which further emphasizes the theme of psychological torment and the unraveling of the human …show more content…

The Yellow Wallpaper raised awareness of the limitations placed on women during the time it was written, and showcased how gender and societal constraints contributed to psychological torment. Even though progress has been made in contemporary society, gender inequalities and the effects of society expectations are still prominent and pertinent today making this story current, relatable, and meaningful. The Pit and The Pendulum, like The Yellow Wallpaper, is still considered current as the story prompts reflection on individuals’ enduring capacity for cruelty, insight into the resilience of the human spirit, as well as the psychological toll of confinement (which seems eerily current with Covid-19’s recent implications). All of these themes resonate in modern discussions on human rights, resilience in the face of adversity, and the importance of mental

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2185 Words | 9 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 is a short story that explores the effects of challenging patriarchal and social oppression on a woman’s mental health. The story’s protagonist is an unnamed woman who is prescribed a rest cure by her physician husband, John, to help her recover from what he describes to be a “nervous depression”. The woman is confined to a room in their summer home decorated with yellow wallpaper. As the days pass, she becomes increasingly fixated on the wallpaper and begins to lose touch with reality. In the final moments of the story, the woman descends into madness, and her husband passes out after discovering the states she is in.

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279 Words | 2 Pages

Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel ‘The Bell Jar’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ both feature a female protagonist that experiences a provoked descent into madness and hysteria as a result of the prolonged and unjust treatment of women situated in a society dominated by the male authority figure. This societal oppression is a proven factor in the deterioration of the mental and physical health of both protagonists and therefore impacts their lives as well as the choices they make. Plath’s The Bell Jar can be seen as a bildungsroman tale of the young Esther Greenwood, entering college in New York in the early 1950s. Esther’s dreams of becoming a professional writer and desire for sexual exploration outweigh her

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1112 Words | 5 Pages

In Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she tells a horrific ghost story about symptoms of the rest cure. The “rest cure” was a treatment developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who restricted women of intellectual stimuli and condemned them to a domestic life to help their postpartum recovery. After being a victim of this treatment, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Careful attention to the use of Gilman’s symbols in her short story allows the reader to analyze some of the themes concerning feminism and societal misogyny. Foreshadowing throughout, Gilman uses the house, the writing, and the wallpaper as symbols to show how man’s use of the “rest cure” limit women in society and offers that the solution to this issue is to persistently tear away at man’s injustice.

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435 Words | 2 Pages

The protagonist of the story, a woman suffering from postpartum depression, is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper that she finds increasingly oppressive and disturbing. The wallpaper symbolizes the patriarchal society that confines women to prescribed roles and suppresses their creativity and autonomy. The protagonist's obsession with the wallpaper represents her own descent into madness, as she struggles against the constraints of her society and her own mental illness. Both stories show how women are oppressed by patriarchal societies and how that oppression has a profound impact on their mental and emotional well-being. The symbols used in both stories convey the sense of confinement and the destruction of potential that comes with that oppression.

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377 Words | 2 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story that takes place at the beginning of the twentieth century which depicts the oppressive nature of marriage from the narrator’s point of view. The unnamed protagonist is suffering from a nervous condition related to postpartum depression. Her husband John, who happens to be a well renowned physician, orders her to solitude and bed rest with minimal social interactions. In the beginning, the narrator rebels against John’s ideal treatment by keeping a secret diary, but as the story progresses John becomes more controlling. John finds his wife’s writing and immediately discontinues one of the narrator’s only means of a creative release.

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1096 Words | 5 Pages

The Struggle of Many Women The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, reflects the life of many women during the difficult times they were living in. The narrator can relate to many people during the Victorian age where the woman’s role was to be a wife and a mother only. The narrator is a woman who is imaginative and is dissociated from herself and from the world.

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1122 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.

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1480 Words | 6 Pages

Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period.

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814 Words | 4 Pages

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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562 Words | 3 Pages

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.

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1155 Words | 5 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high

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1009 Words | 5 Pages

Mariana is mentally trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and dysfunction as a result of not having a husband present. Even though the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper had a husband to ‘take care of her’, she was still oppressed and physically entrapped as a result of not conforming to the strict binary gender norms of Victorian society. While both works could be interpreted as represented as portraying women as having weak mental fortitude, it is a more nuanced view to acknowledge that their madness was caused by the confinement they experienced, not the other way around. Mariana and The Yellow Wallpaper highlight the damaging effects of gender roles and societal expectations on women's mental well-being, and challenge the notion of women as inherently weak or dependent, instead placing the blame on the oppressive systems that confine

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779 Words | 4 Pages

The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.

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1091 Words | 5 Pages

She identified the yellow wallpaper as a metaphor for women’s discourse. The narrator’s underlying feelings of confusion, depression, and frustration was covered by the yellow wallpaper which she rips from the walls at the very end to reveal “what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque or fails to perceive at all” (35). The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as the conflict of gender inequality and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The imagery reflects on how women feel toward sexual inequality and the situation with

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1007 Words | 5 Pages

A dignified wife and mother, she experiences a nervous breakdown, and her husband decided to rent a distant country manor to create appropriate conditions for the woman’s recovery. The closer analysis made his benevolent intentions look more like an attempt to incarcerate the lady and limit her of activities she needed for improvement of her physical and mental state. The man believed he made effective decisions in his fight with a typical female hysteria. But, as a result, the character started to hallucinate and see a woman, imprisoned in the pattern of the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. At the end of the story her personality totally degraded; the woman stopped to understand who she is and did not recognize her closest people: “Now why should that man have fainted?...

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