This also explores the theme of isolation; MacCaig is isolated from the nurses due to his lack of acceptance. The following verse begins with a short, simple sentence: ”Ward 7”. This is used to show what the writer sees (the sign outside the ward), and the full stop is used to show that this is where the writer stops walking through the hospital, as he has reached his destination. Following this, imagery is used, “She lies/in a white cave of forgetfulness”, suggesting that the woman is isolated from her surroundings and unreachable to the writer, and is perhaps having trouble with her memory. A metaphor is then used to describe the woman’s movements, “A withered hand/trembles on its stalk”.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of how Nurse Ratched’s barbaric leadership over a mental hospital ward comes to an end. From the point of view of Chief Bromden, a patient in the asylum, he recounts how it all begins when Randle McMurphy arrives at the hospital. The ward may appear to be run by a kind, gentle persona on the outside; however, McMurphy quickly sees the reality of the situation under the mask that Nurse Ratched puts up. The issues of her patients are not being resolved, and there is no progress being made either. Nothing changes until McMurphy shows up with his outgoing and fearless demeanor.
She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the
Final Exam: Prompt 1 In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey he discusses the harsh reality of living in a mental institution in the 1950’s. Kesey looks at the world from Bromdens view point a schizophrenic patient who the other patients view as deaf and dumb, despite his ability to hear and understand them just fine. The patients being use to their routines, or living “in the fog” as Bromden calls it. This lead to an uneasy change when McMurphy arrives from a work farm, pretending to be mentally ill, and disrupts their whole way of life.
Psychiatric hospitals are proven to provide assistance and treatment to those who live with mental illnesses. The system is designed to take away the suffering, assist in the patient’s recovery, and put them on the path toward good health and a happy life. Although hospitals are supposed to take a certain level of responsibility over a patient; in this ward, the control over the patients are clearly interfering with their well being. In Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched’s suffocating authority and the ward’s power over the patients are exacerbating their illness instead of helping these patients heal, proving that them being mentally ill is a faux. Nurse Ratched controls the men with her therapeutic community.
The heavy bedstead, which was nailed to the ground, was another feature that represents the room as a jail cell. Therefore, the room that she is prisoned shows how the madness benefited her to gain control and achieve a way to escape her confinement. In conclusion, the diverse literature 's do share a common theme that shows women fighting to overcome societal expectations due to the female gender not valued as thinkers capable of being their equals and mental illness can be caused by society’s stereotypical
The ways she influenced the world were both insignificant and significant. A game about her travels around the world was made, titled, “Round the World with Nellie Bly, a Novel and Fascinating Game with Plenty of Excitement by Land and Sea” (Huet). She wrote two books on her experiences. Bly “recounted her journey in a book entitled Around the World in Seventy-Two Days” (Huet), and then Bly “published her daring dispatches as a book, “Ten Days in a Mad-House” (Markel). Because of the exposés on Blackwell’s Island’s New York City Lunatic Asylum, the aldermen of the area “‘appropriate[s] an extra $1,000,000 per annum’ to correct many of the abuses Bly exposed” (Markel).
When stepping inside a hospital to receive help, one should expect care, treatment, and respect. However, shown in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and “Howl,” American society equates mental illness with inhumanity. In both texts, the characters are forced to live without basic human freedoms and a voice to change it. Society pressures the mentally ill into becoming submissive counterparts of the community by stripping away their physical freedoms, forcing inhumane treatment, and depriving them the freedom of expression. By pressuring confinement and treating the patients inhumanely, society strips away their freedom to express themselves.
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.
Asylums weren’t always like the ones we imagine today, full of harm in and inhumane acts. However, with the increase of asylums in the 1900s, the average amount of patients house increased from 115 in 1806 to over 1000 in the 1900s. The optimism Once present among the people that those with mental abnormalities could be cured vanished, no longer did people believe in a cure for abnormal behavior. Instead of asylums aiming to rehabilitate, they became a place where the “crazy” or “insane” go to live out the rest of their lives
Nellie Bly was the penname of Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864-1922), a trailblazer in the field of investigative journalism, not just for the fact she was a woman but due to the nature of her work. Bly was known for breaking down gender barriers and taking on daring assignments. Her most famous work was “Ten Days in a Mad-House," published in 1887, her full account of how she went undercover to reveal the harrowing conditions and abuse facing the patients of the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York City. Her work inspired significant reforms in the treatment of mentally ill patients and helped to advance the women’s rights movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While Nellie Bly’s groundbreaking work “Ten Days in a Mad-House" was considered atypical for the 19th century, it remains significant and relevant due to the impact her work has had on social reform efforts, journalism, and the continuing struggle for the rights of the mentally ill.
Her descriptions of the room, with the furniture seemingly being nailed to the floor and the windows being “barred” show an underlying understanding that her thoughts and personality is being confined. The irony present in this description, due to her belief that the room used to be a nursery, shows her early denial of her husband’s dominance over her. As the story progresses and she begins to see the woman behind the wallpaper, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s realization that she is the one that is actually being suppressed. The descriptions of the wallpaper, showing how confining it is for the symbolic woman behind it, shows how the narrator is being trapped by those bars in both her marriage and in her mental illness. Thus when she says, “At night in any kind of light… it becomes bars,” the reader is shown how restricted the narrator feels, reflected through the wallpaper.
In recent reports it has been shown that child labor has definitely decreased over the past 10 years. The only problem is that since China is not obligated to publish or give any information their child labor statistics, it is unclear if there has been a serious decline. It is doubtful that China with their weak government interference and high drop out rates, that they experience the same decrease in child labor. Each year employers begin to adapt to cutting their labor costs and making a more compliant workforce, so there is no need for them to stop hiring children, it is actually beneficial to them. Since child workers do not affect the economic stability of China such as unemployment or migrant workers moving in to urban cities, this cause for their special needs to be overlooked by either the government or special organizations.
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.
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.
