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The Yellow Wallpaper Insanity

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 at the height of the Victorian era is often mistaken as a feminist short story. She tries to tell its readers how women have been confined in this “domestic role” since the beginning of time. The narrator uses the wallpaper to represent the society she lives in. Not only does the wallpaper affect the narrator, but also it influences everyone that meets it. And how these roles ultimately will drive any woman insane. Men dominated the workplace and was head of his household that was just what life was back then. In earlier centuries, it was unusual for a woman to work alongside men. As time went on the nineteenth century, progressed men commuted to their place of work. And as …show more content…

For a person who almost was physically and mentally destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s “resting cure” for depression, it is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this ineffective and cruel course of treatment. Gilman knew that at some point in the reader’s lives’ they too have experienced the feeling of being over powered something or someone. Gilman was maybe hoping on the fact that the readers would know a little something about claustrophobia or resentment, so that you can sympathize with the narrator of this short story in her slow spiral to insanity. I believe Gilman was not trying to create of form of clinical study of insanity but instead to feel every crawling inch of craziness. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a mind that is already infected with anxiety can deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in the story, took Gilman’s criticism to heart and abandoned the “resting cure.” Beyond the specific technique described in the story, Gilman means to criticize any form of medical care that ignores the concerns of the patient, considering her only as a passive object of

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Paula A. Treichler from the University of Illinois analyzes “The Yellow Wallpaper” and its effects of the diagnosis given to the main character effectively in her article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”. In her article, Treichler emphasizes the reasons why the main character was lead to believe her diagnosis from her husband and the other contributing factors that played a role in her hysteria, such as lack of social interaction and confinement. In the introduction to her article, Treichler gives the background of the story and hits on every area of importance. The diagnosis made by the narrator 's husband is highlighted by Treichler in her opening paragraph to illustrate the significance and informality of the diagnosis and its unreliability.

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Doctors of the 19th century thought they were above everyone else because of their education and had a tendency to disregard the patient’s suggestions. Jacobus asserts in his work that “The hysteria that is femininity must be repressed in the interests of a masculinist psychoanalytic theory; the uncanny that is narrative must be repressed in order to sustain a realist view of fiction” (qtd. in E. Showalter 30). As the subject of male doctors’ authority, 35 years of feminist criticism had turned the interpretation of the story’s narrator into a victim of patriarchal control. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” John says, “you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know” (Gilman 236).

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In the prose “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both pieces of literature show the themes of womanhood, and how the two stories can be connected. In the poem “Girl”, Kincaid beautifully portrays

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“The Yellow Wall-Paper" was written in 1892, and is seen as a feminist short story. The woman in the story goes ‘mad’ due to her very limited role within society at the time. Along with her madness, the ability to express herself creatively is also being confined within the very yellow walls of a room, that has bars on the window, and a lock on the other side of the door, on the top level of the house her husband has her locked up in. Forbidden to write due to her doctor husband’s prescription of ‘absolute and complete rest of body and mind’, the narrator, who is unnamed. This narrator soon becomes obsessed with the room's wallpaper.

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The Struggle of Many Women The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, reflects the life of many women during the difficult times they were living in. The narrator can relate to many people during the Victorian age where the woman’s role was to be a wife and a mother only. The narrator is a woman who is imaginative and is dissociated from herself and from the world.

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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.

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"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late 19th century, which explores the physical and mental deterioration of a woman who is prescribed the "rest cure" for her postpartum depression. The protagonist is a married woman who is forced to take the "rest cure" by her husband and Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. In the process of the "rest cure", she was locked in a room with yellow wallpaper, which gradually deteriorated her mental state. The “rest cure” was a popular treatment for women's mental illness at the time, and it consisted of total bed rest, isolation, and a lack of intellectual stimulation. There are many elements related to Gothic literature and Gothic style in "Yellow Wallpaper".

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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

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, which was published in 1891, stirred controversy among US physicians as it raised issues that were on the agenda at the time. The perception of insanity was evolving throughout the 19th century. Mad people used to be considered as criminals or idiots that needed to be locked up. Then, there was a shift in mentality and a mad person was typically a troubled woman suffering either from hysteria or neurasthenia. According to psychiatrists, both of these ailments were due to selfishness and intentional self-destructiveness.

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The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.

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Silas Weir Mitchell first developed the rest cure(treatment). He developed the rest cure while he was an army surgeon in the Civil War. Evidence of the rest treatment working is mentioned in The Evolution of the Rest Treatment, Mitchell wrote how he helped Mrs. G. Mrs. G was his first successful case using the rest treatment. While it worked for Mrs. G, it failed for Gilman.

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She identified the yellow wallpaper as a metaphor for women’s discourse. The narrator’s underlying feelings of confusion, depression, and frustration was covered by the yellow wallpaper which she rips from the walls at the very end to reveal “what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque or fails to perceive at all” (35). The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as the conflict of gender inequality and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The imagery reflects on how women feel toward sexual inequality and the situation with

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Gothic Horror is a unique style of writing that is “characterized by elements such as fear and death along with romantic themes such as nature, individuality, and extreme emotion” while realism is a writing style that “presents the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short, horror-filled story that vividly describes the mentally ill narrator’s experiences and emotional struggles of loneliness, anxiety, and uneasiness while being locked in a hideous room by herself for a long period of time. The story is definitely an example of realism, but the gothic horror writing style powerfully presents itself throughout the text with the use of eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpapered room, the narrator's

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