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The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

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Mental health, especially in women, was ignored and regarded to as a temporary “nervousness” that can easily be cured with rest. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a young woman suffering from depression and anxiety when she visited a specialist and was told that her nervousness could be easily solved with a “rest cure”. This misguided advice inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” which follows the story of a young woman whose husband disregards her anxiety and depression as “nervousness” and leaves her for several weeks alone in a room to “rest”. His ignorance demonstrates the gender dominance in their relationship, as well as the class structure which is presented because of John’s education and career. The narrator eventually has an extreme …show more content…

“[The house] is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village… there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people." Overall, it is a very isolated place that is far from the road, three miles from any society, and contains many “locks” and “separate houses”. The house’s physical set-up mirrors the narrator's emotional position: isolated and restricted. This isolation is encouraged by John, who is a high ranking physician and says that he wants the best for her, but makes every decision regarding her life, including where she can live and go, while also disregarding her illness. “There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?" This overlooking and confinement are reflected when she begins to see a women trapped behind the wallpaper in her room. The woman whom the narrator imagines behind the wallpaper in a direct embodiment of the metaphorical restriction. Since the narrator is not permitted to leave, and also not able to write and be creative, her mind uses the paper as a creative outlet for her imagination in order to escape the confinement and restrictions set in place by her

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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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Since her husband, a physician of high standard, has prescribed a "rest cure" for her nervous condition, the protagonist is forced to suppress her creative urges and conform to societal expectations of a submissive and passive wife who is to remain still in a room with “the yellow wallpaper.” This suppression ultimately leads to her descent into madness as she struggles to reconcile her own desires with the expectations placed upon her. While the lady narrates the entire story, it is interesting to note that she is not in control of her own life and decisions. Rather, she is a victim of societal norms and gender roles that restrict her agency and

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He wants her to take a room upstairs, it was a nursery, then a playroom it has windows with bars on each wall that look out in every direction. She describes the walls as having repellant ghastly unclean yellow faded wallpaper that has been torn and shredded in patches. She stays in that dreary room alone most of the time, as John is away most the day and even the night at times. , she also talks briefly about a baby that she can’t be with an it makes her nervous It’s thought that this leads to her being lonely and depressed.

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The Yellow Wallpaper Literary Analysis Essay Identity is key to the one who seizes it. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator has an identity that the author demonstrates. The narrator has an internal battle within herself, that may express depression or a severe mental illness. The narrator shows identity from her actions, reactions, thoughts, and expectations.

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The narrator expresses her feeling of imprisonment when she is reminiscing the night before. She explains how she had seen strange things on the wallpaper when the moonlight creeps in the window and reflects upon the wallpaper. She expresses the creepy feeling when she tells us that “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 234). The narrator also explains at the end of the short story that the yellow paper symbolized a jail cell for her. When she tears off most of the wallpaper in the nursery, she exclaimed, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman 237).

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Stenson shows how Jane, an already ill woman, begins to become even more psychologically weakened due to solitary confinement. This story signifies how Charlotte Perkins Stenson, herself, was actually subjected to the slow departure of her own mental health. It allows us to view how isolation can inescapably drive a person to a certain breaking point and into a downward spiral that can ultimately end in lunacy. The story starts off sounding sweet and innocent enough.

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This observation also serves as the narrator recognizing the paper’s, or boundary’s, relevance to herself; she sees a “woman”--a reflection of herself--trapped behind the paper, confined by that thin line that separates herself from total insanity. Her behavior becomes obsessive: she keeps a constant vigil of the wallpaper at night, and claims that the woman behind the wallpaper “is all the time trying to climb through” (348). And the narrator aids her escape--as soon as she is given the opportunity: “I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (349). The destruction of the wallpaper is symbolic of her fully delving into the world of insanity. From this point

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Even though she will well aware that her husband, sister and doctor find it a un- likely cure and are against it. We are also to that the narrator tries to cope with her problems as well. Unlike John, who simply ignores his obstacles, the narrator descends into a sense of imagination to help mentally heal herself. The narrator becomes almost compulsively obsessed with the idea of freeing the women behind the bars of the yellow wallpaper. She says, “There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will.

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In Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", the wallpaper itself, albeit only a thing in nature, becomes a vital part of the story's narrative, even seems to present itself as more alive than the other characters in the narrative. This "life" enables the "thing" to mirror the main character's intentions and progress throughout the story, mainly because of how the main character observes the paper and because of its relative physical and psychological relation towards the characters inside the story. This qualifies the wallpaper as an It-narrator, and thus enables it to become a vital narrator for the short story. Character and paper are linked: it is a reflective surface, but it is also the confinement, a body encasing the protagonist,

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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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“I’ve got out at last. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can never put me back!” The narrator is trapped, and when she peels off the wallpaper she is stepping out to

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Nonetheless, her husband insists that she not change the wallpaper lest doing so gives way to other “fancies” (Gilman 195). Repeatedly any concerns conveyed by the narrator are dismissed by her husband and

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However, in stories such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s point of view is what truly helps define the setting and symbolism. Without the narrator’s distinct point of view on how she

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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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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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