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The Yellow Wallpaper Insanity Analysis

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From Yellow to Lunacy “We’re much more controlled now. We were kids back then we each had our own demons. It was insanity.” - Peter Criss. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the summer of a woman’s journey to insanity. The woman felt controlled and overshadowed by loved ones, stubbornly defiant about following instructions, and consequently became a component of her own hysteria. Jane and John go to a summer house while their own home is being repaired. John is a doctor and is not concerned that his wife’s nervous fits are much to worry. ”You see he does not believe I am sick!...My brother is also a physician and also of high standing, and he says the same thing” (Gilman 1). She disagrees, but feels trapped by the supposed best opinion. ”But what is one to do?” (1) When someone feels restricted from being or …show more content…

She doesn’t mind that it wears her out because it keeps her sane. The yellow wallpaper of the room she is confined to irks her innards: the confusing pattern, the disgusting color, and the unusual shadows. “John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief” (Gilman 6)! She wants to write and does whenever John or his sister Jennie isn’t looking. Ironically, writing about the walls keeps her grounded, yet leads to her madness. The shadows from a window above Jane’s bed, fueled by her imagination, fashion themselves to look like tiny women. The wind and normal flow of nature cause these images to seem animate. As the summer ends, she becomes obsessed with figuring the wallpaper out. Her mind was still quite uneasy about the shadows. “I don’t like to LOOK out of the windows even - there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast (Gilman 13). In her twisted fantasy these people have been weaving in and out of the walls all summer. Her creativity runs her mind so ragged it kills

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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 brings her to a room with yellow wallpaper, a bed that is nailed to the ground, and barred windows. As the days progress the narrator is not allowed to write and she grows to hate the yellow wallpaper. She is disturbed by the paper and wants to tear it down, but does not have the nerve to tell him. She stews and grows fascinated with the wallpaper. Jennie comes to help with taking care of the narrator.

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Overtime, Jane begins to obsess over the wall and its features. She mentions, “The patterns, the yellow, the slight coat of dust, and the roughness of the yellow wallpaper.” Jane becomes completely infatuated. She begins to spend all of her time touching, watching, and talking about the wall. Jane once hated the wallpaper.

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With all the effort needed to write and make her logs she eventually becomes exhausted and slows down making logs, not only that her logs become shorter her vocabulary less formal and fluent. She turns to the wallpaper as the intellectual stimulus she needs and uses it to keep her mind intact but slowly losing it as a result of this, beginning with her hatred for the wallpaper following with her curiosity of the patterns and her determination to find some kind of conclusion to the wallpaper and then finally describing the wallpaper to have a woman trapped inside of itself. As we see her descent into insanity it shows her true feelings of imprisonment and finds herself being the woman in the wallpaper until eventually breaking free from her confinement like the woman in the wallpaper had done before, although it was already far too late for our

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, raises many questions from readers and makes us think about what has really caused the narrator to become insane in her story. Due to her husband’s controlling nature as a physician, there have been many moments where he treats her like a child that should be kept away from the outside world, which eventually drove her to insanity. She says, “dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

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Throughout the story, Gilman illustrates different kinds of female identity and critiques the roles that women were forced into at the time. She uses imagery to both illustrate the setting that the narrator is in but also how this affects Jane, and her use of symbolism is meant to highlight the narrator’s struggles through various objects. Her serious yet innocent tone throughout the tale also highlights how the narrator is affected by her identity and experiences as a woman. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses imagery, symbolism, and tone to shows how the gender roles of her time negatively impact women’s mental health. First of all, Gilman shows how the narrator is trapped in both her physical place as well as her mental state through the use of vivid imagery showing the house, room, and wallpaper.

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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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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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She begins to see strangles heads in the wallpaper, which can be a symbolic representation of the patriarchal order that stifled women. The bars on the wallpaper that cage the imaginary women are a reflection of her own situation where she is confined in the old mansion. Even the smell of the wallpaper, which she describes as being ‘yellow’ and present throughout the house, is a reflection of the mental repression that is always present in her life. She is so consumed by the smell that she thinks about burning the old mansion just to cover it

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Over the course of time, being in isolation, the narrator becomes fond of the wallpaper studying and attempting to figure out the pattern. As her obsession grows over the wallpaper the pattern becomes clear to her. She begins to see a woman bending down creeping behind the patterns that act like bars on a cage. The wallpaper dominates her imagination and she begins to sleep less. she sees the woman behind the pattern shaking the bars in the day and creeping during the night.

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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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At the beginning of the short story Jane absolutely hates the wallpaper in her bedroom, but at the end Jane claims that she is “getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper.” (page ) At the beginning of the story Jane is aggravated at John and after John’s treatment she describes him as “so wise” (page ) and “loving [her] so.” (page ) Throughout the “Yellow Wallpaper” John consistently makes Jane’s condition worse and worse until she finally has a mental breakdown.

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(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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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 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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