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The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it shows a story about a woman struggling with depression and suffering. This story helps show readers what silencing women can do to them. Her brother and husband, both are physicians and believe they know what's best for her, which is isolating her and convincing her she is not sick. She is convinced by them even though she does not agree with what they are saying. She tries to reach out to her husband, but convinces her that she needs to rest. Later on in the story, her silence becomes stronger and her sanity becomes weak. This is a huge problem when women are silenced because in the end, she is suffering and loses her sanity. In the beginning of the story, it shows her husband and her brother already silence’s her. They both do this since they are both physicians and do not physically see this illness she has. When she explained to her husband that she feels sick she explained “he does not believe I am sick!” (page 1). Her husband …show more content…

The girl lost her sanity by her husband and everyone else around her shutting down her thoughts and words. The wife seems to find someone trapped in the yellow wallpaper because she explained that a “faint figure seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” (page 5). The girl became so obsessed with the wallpaper she believes that this woman “crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.” (page 7). Furthermore, her husband faints because he is shocked due to seeing her become crazy and she would “creep over him every time.” (page 9). This is engaging that silencing a woman can be mentally challenging and become lonely. Women face many struggles through men being over controlling towards a girl's life. This all comes down to a huge problem in society with women being silenced by men and losing their

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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

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It is clear that the narrator does not agree with her husband or the physician, as evident by her describing her hopelessness in the situation and saying, literally, that she disagrees with their opinions. The perspective she has on her own mental illness is important in developing the story because she feels disconnected from others for feeling a way that those in “high standing" do not believe she should feel. The thoughts she develops of her own wellbeing help the audience to distinguished whether or not she is truly ill, or if her caretakes are uneducated on mental health, as medical professionals unfortunatley were during that time

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She is, obviously used to not being treated with respect and dignity.   As it is stated in the text, "he does not believe that (she is) sick," and she recognizes that and can play a role in why her recovery is taking so long.   He has even assured her friends and relatives "that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency," so the wife is left without comfort or real compassion.

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During her time in the room she felt the room “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 304). The narrator of the yellow wallpaper descends into madness to escape the cruel dominance of her society. As the story progresses the yellow wallpaper becomes a constant companion. She first dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but after closely studying the pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” and after obsessing over the painting she finds bars hidden.

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1002 Words | 5 Pages

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman 244). The narrator describes herself becoming part of an inanimate object and escaping her confinement. When she becomes depressed after giving birth to her child, the narrator has strict orders to follow in order to “make her better.” As she follows the doctor’s commands and isolates herself from everyone and everything she loved, she loses her mental stability.

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While she feels immensely saddened by the death of her husband, she also feels unburdened by his loss. She is suddenly free of the restraints he placed on her. However shortly after her revelation, her husband entered their house, and her restraints

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Though she is unaware of it, she was responsible for the damages to the bedstead. In addition, her changing perspective on the wallpaper indicates her becoming increasingly unreliable. At first, she states that” This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern…a particularly irritating one.” (The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman). As she spends more time in the nursery as part of her treatment and less time partaking in more stimulating activities, she starts to see the pattern as a living woman.

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In addition to making her feel depressed, nervous, lonely, angry, and limited, he also makes her feel worthless and discouraged. In her following sentence, we can see how she internalized the feeling of worthlessness: “I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!” (Gilman 9). Also, through “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” we can see how the patriarchal medical establishment can harm women by denying them agency and autonomy over their bodies. For example, the protagonist states her husband underestimates her illness, and she accuses him of preventing her from getting well.

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Lastly, In the story her husband never lets her talk about house she feels, so she keeps it all bottled up in her head which eventually drives her crazy. As “The Yellow Wallpaper” States “It 's hard to talk to john about my case, because he loves me so. But I tried to last night” (777 Gilman). This show another great example of women cruelty because back then women were not allowed to state there own opinion and also

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814 Words | 4 Pages

However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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562 Words | 3 Pages

(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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1155 Words | 5 Pages

Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

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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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484 Words | 2 Pages

The woman was obsessed with the wallpaper she begins to hallucinate that something was creeping on her. She had locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in the bedroom with her because she was trying to trap the creeper that she thought she saw. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” say,“‘Open the door, my darling!’ , ‘I can’t,’ said I. ‘ The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf’”

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He said, “If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it?”(pg.5) She stayed up and cried alone after the accusations, and it was not uncommon to cry alone and not express their feelings to their husbands in this time period. Throughout the book she was having these “awakening” experiences discovering

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