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The Yellow Wallpaper Character Analysis

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“I never saw a worse paper in my life…. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. … I should hate it myself if i had to live in this room long. … the room, … But I don’t mind it a bit- only the paper” (Gilman, 3 & 4). The main character addresses the fact that the room, even with its restraining rings and bed nailed to the floor, does not bother her. Instead, it is the yellow wallpaper. The color is an unsightly yellow that vexes the main character mind into further. The main character openly admits that her husband contributes to her mental deterioration by neglecting to acknowledge that there is a problem. In conjunction, she also admits that, in spite of the devoured …show more content…

The lack of trust of her peers as well as insufficient living quarters aids her mental digression. In Memoirs of a Madman, by Nikolai Gogol, the main character suffers from paranoia and he compares the people as cannibals. However, this is a story about how a man who falls in love with a woman named Maria, and how he writes things that he finds or does in his diary, and later finds out that he is the king of spain. Therefore, the main character, flies to spain to retain the role that he was meant for. “Tonight the moon is very bright. I have not seen it for over thirty years, so today when I saw it I felt in unusually high spirits. I begin to realize that during the past thirty-odd years I have been in the dark; but now I must be extremely careful. Otherwise why should that dog at the Chao house have looked at me twice? I have reason for my fear.” (Lu Xun,1)! Readers are introduced to the initial problem for the main character, going crazy. It is because he delivers by going from relatively sane to completely insane. Such as him saying he can hear the dogs talking by writing each other letters. “In the morning I sat

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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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480 Words | 2 Pages

The questions of inner thought and understanding the are ones that we are constantly perturbed by. Stories with a character that seem to be ‘mad’ garner more attention and study than those with characters that seem to be ‘flat.’ This is reflected in the two short stories that we analyze today, “The Cask of Amontillado,” by Edgar Allen Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both stories discuss the idea of mortality among the mad. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” madness is seen as trivial, simply a means to revenge for a character scorned, similar to in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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1031 Words | 5 Pages

As the story progresses, the narrator commits atrocious crimes, such as gruesomely murdering his cat and killing his wife for no apparent reason, which comes as a shock to the reader. The unpredictable and drastic character change comes as a shock to the reader. The narrator dives into a world of terrifying madness that evokes great fear and psychological terror. In “The Hypnotist” (Bierce 1893/2003) the narrator’s emotions are predictable and stay the same throughout the story. Bierce (1893/2003) paints the narrator as scientific and straightforward.

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Character analysis over the Yellow Wallpaper The unnamed narrator which is also the protagonist of the short story “Yellow Wallpaper” shows inferiority to her husband John throughout the entirety of the story. Her husband John, limits the amount of creativity she is “allowed” to have. He does this by not allowing her to write although the narrator still does in fact write but only when she knows she can get away with it. The narrator wants to go outside she wants to interact with other people yet she will not stand up for herself which shows great inferior to John. Which of the time period that was almost the normal the men made the rules but it was also a time period where women were pushing equal rights.

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The Wallpaper becomes a "living", narrating character which tells this story from the perspective of an it-narrative, mainly because of its intensive relationship with the main narrator. Physically, it cocoons the main character, and gradually, over the course of the character's descent into madness, also nears its own destruction until what has been trapped behind the wall, and within the main character, frees itself. Psychologically, the wallpaper in the story, has the role of conversation partner for the nameless character and becomes another narrator, one mirroring and narrating the character's inner life, which can then aids in the narration of what the woman can not say but what needs to be transmitted to the reader in order to make the character understandable (Tischleder 2014: 36).

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The narrator is a woman who is imaginative trying to make her mind think and realize the meaning of the yellow wallpaper. She describes the wallpaper as, “repellant, almost revolting; smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (Gilman 641). This specific wallpaper makes the narrator feel a certain way. At first, she does not like the color or how it looks. But then not having anything else to do in the room, she starts examining the wallpaper.

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326 Words | 2 Pages

The Psychotic Wife The women in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, claims to be sick. Her husband who is a doctor, does not believe that she is sick. This kind of drives the women crazy because she is trying to convince everyone that she is sick. Her husband just tells her to not do anything and she’ll get better, but resting won’t cure what she has.

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Secondly, throughout the story, the narrator describes seeing an evolving woman trapped inside of the wall. Although readers can assume that this woman is merely a product of the narrator’s mind, the woman can also be seen as a symbol of the narrator and her feelings of being trapped. Eventually, the woman in the wall aids the narrator in her escape. In conclusion, many elements of the narrator’s increasing madness throughout The Yellow Wallpaper contributed to her freedom from the confines of the room, the confines of society, and the confines of her

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1689 Words | 7 Pages

In the intense short story collection The Illustrated Man, author Ray Bradbury introduces various themes about human flaws in society. Among these themes is the idea of living in a chaotic society, how people are affected by this, and how one can maintain sanity. Bradbury uses a number of short stories to show different perspectives of chaos and its effects on the characters, followed by how each character handles their particular situation. Bradbury uses the theme of living in an insane society to prompt a discussion on modern society and its people’s experiences of similar insanities and the way in which they deal with them.

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961 Words | 4 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper” gives insight into the life of a mental illness patient. Unfortunally, her husband is her doctor. John, the husband, is not the main protagonist, but plays a significant role in the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is told from the first person’s perspective of the narrator. Therefore, the reader is only able to observe John from the perspective of the narrator and the only way the reader can learn about John is through the narrator’s interpretations of his actions.

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1008 Words | 5 Pages

Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

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1470 Words | 6 Pages

This book explored schizophrenia as a rational response to unbearable experiences. When he sat down to write the book in the late 1950s, the outlook in psychiatry was that the mind of an unbalanced person was just an amalgamation of senseless fantasies or obsessions. Patients were simply tested for certain symptoms of mental illness, and treated proportionately. His goal was “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible”, and he accomplished this by showing how psychosis – especially, that relating to schizophrenia - actually “makes sense to the person suffering it.” According to him, the psychiatrist on his/her part should simply get inside the mind of the sufferer.

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The narrator leads a fairly boring life. The only thing she seems to do all day is sleep, write, eat, look out the window and study the yellow wallpaper in her room. Evidence of this in the story is “I lie here on this great immovable bed - it is nailed down, I believe - and follow that pattern about by the hour” (Gilman 650). Another piece of evidence would be, “The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman 649).

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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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