ipl-logo

The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

794 Words4 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a fascinating story about a woman who struggles with her mental health in a facility that is supposed to help her get better. The story was written at a time when the roles of women were beginning to change; however, the ideas of submission and domesticity were still prevalent. Gilman brings to light a variety of ideas about women’s roles in the nineteenth century through her story. Her work was used as a critique against the expectation that women should submit to their husbands, the struggles of mental health, and the struggles of motherhood. Gilman’s first critique of women’s roles in the nineteenth century was about the expectation that women should submit to their husbands. At the beginning of the story the main character explains, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 317). The woman is explaining how her husband (and brother) is a physician and is making decisions about her illness with no regard for how she feels about it. She disagrees with the way he is treating her disorder. However, because of the …show more content…

Throughout the story, the woman talks about a child that she does not get to see while she is in the facility. She says, “Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” (319). The woman clearly loves her child; however, she does not feel that she is the best person to take care of it because of her nervous disorder – which is now known as Post-Partum Depression. The relationship the narrator has with the yellow wallpaper shows her struggle with the way she feels about her baby. In that period, women were expected to care for their children. However, the narrator struggles with those feelings because of depression and that drives her personification of the woman trapped in the

Show More
Related
994 Words | 4 Pages

l throughout the novel Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, the women of the Boatwright family, despite their capabilities, tough shells, and tenacity, bow down to the men of the family. While these tough southern women are not afraid to take their brothers to task or yell at their husbands, they still subscribe to the gender roles expected of all women, roles that place them in a submissive position to the men in their lives. Women take care of the children, the home, and clothe their children and men. The place in the family that women are allowed to occupy is a place in the home, as a caretaker and nurturer. This role is often one that doesn’t satisfy women.

Read More
588 Words | 3 Pages

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

Read More
78 Words | 1 Pages

When writing a literary argumentative essay, I will need to choose a story and the topic from the story that I agree with and find reliable and credible sources to research and cite to support my thesis. In, Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's: The Yellow Wallpaper, for example one could argue as to whether the wife really had a psychological problem that her husband, a physician, was trying to treat, or if being confined and isolated drove her to

Read More
826 Words | 4 Pages

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the one that stood out to me the most. Jane the female lead has no control over her life, she can’t speak for herself because of the male dominance of her husband. Women wanted to “establish their humanity without sacrificing their identity as women” (Marston, Rockwell) because they weren’t seen, men thought they were just there to do everything they say. Throughout the story, Jane is diagnosed with depression, and this was a time when women were not allowed to speak for themselves. Jane’s husband tries to control her but says he’s helping her because he’s a physician.

Read More
1294 Words | 6 Pages

A World of External Silence with an Audible Mind As someone who personally struggled with mental illness, author Shannon L. Alder quotes, “Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” People may recall when they have been rejected by close acquaintances, but the true, shocking memories are those of rejection from friends and family. These issues strike the most in people because they try to live a fulfilling life to please friends and family, while inside, they are the ones suffering. A society that is split between equality and destruction leads to a deranged world in themselves.

Read More
1243 Words | 5 Pages

We soon grew to see that mother-love has more than one channel of expression. I think the reason our children are so—so fully loved, by all of us, is that we never—any of us—have enough of our own. (93) Somel, one of the tutors of country says these words to Van toward the end of Chapter 6, during one of their long discussions about the idea of motherhood in Herland. Gilman wants to show that even though the women have lived without men for so long, they are not less feminine than other women and not unnatural in their feelings. These women experience a desire for motherhood as great as any woman’s, but it is a desire likely bound to go unfulfilled to some extent.

Read More
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.

Read More
919 Words | 4 Pages

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins is an intriguing story that set my mind of to wonder. Told by the first person narrator point of view and the way the story is describe puts me in the narrators shoes, in a way that I can feel what she experienced. As the story takes place around the Victorian era, the protagonist gets lost and asphyxiated in her own prison within the walls of a nursery scheme that created a creepy and dreadful feeling. The main character who pertained anonymous, was diagnostic by her husband of a nervous condition, more probably was postpartum depression.

Read More
1295 Words | 6 Pages

Women in the 1800’ and early 1900’s were treated the same as slaves, second class citizens who had no voice or decision over their lives. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 with a late American 19th century setting. The main character, a nameless woman, fights depression and anxiety along with being oppressed by her husband John and wanting to rise against the norms of

Read More
868 Words | 4 Pages

What would you do if your partner kept you locked up inside a house to help “fix” your mental illness? Would you be to blame for not leaving or is blame dependent on circumstance? In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an unnamed narrator, later called Jane, is driven to madness by her speculated postpartum depression that was left essentially untreated due to the misogyny that was a norm at the time. In the era this story takes place in (the 1920s), women such as Jane were often given broad diagnoses such as “nervous depression”, which Jane was said to have, and got “treated” through a rest cure. A rest cure would consist of a few nature walks and no work or activity other than that.

Read More
709 Words | 3 Pages

Gothic horror and psychological terror are both present in the short tale "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read the first-person account of an unnamed woman's struggle with maternal depression throughout the story. The narrator of the tale gradually loses her mind as she becomes more fixated on the yellow wallpaper in her room. She endures the duration of her three-month stay in a colonial mansion with her physician spouse John and his sister, confined in this room alone, the wallpaper plaguing her throughout her stay.

Read More
562 Words | 3 Pages

The story focuses on the main character who is a woman suffering from mental illness. It is very clear that the woman is ill when she states, “You see, he does not believe I am sick!” (677) speaking of her husband who is a doctor. So first she admits she is sick then later she states, “I am glad my case is not serious!”

Read More
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

Read More
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.

Read More
1091 Words | 5 Pages

Gender Inequality: A Woman’s Struggle in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman captures the lives of women in a society based on societal expectations during the late nineteenth century. She focuses on the issue of gender inequality where women were often discriminated against and expected to fulfill the role of a perfect wife and mother. The narrator is based on on Gilman’s personal experience of suffering from her treatment for postpartum depression due to the social restrictions on women which represents a reflection on women's social status in society. The narrator, who remains anonymous, is depicted as a depressed and isolated prisoner who is oppressed under her husband’s control and struggles to break free.

Read More

More about The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Related Topics

Open Document