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Theme Of Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The story that I chose, is “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. I've chosen this short story based on the physical environment. I found that the physical environment back in the 1800s based on how mental illness is looked upon is most interesting; however, it socially wasn't acceptable. My focus is how mental illness is treated physically and physically how a person suffering from mental illness felt. The main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the author herself, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an account of how she felt struggling with mental illness. Charlotte's husband John, a prominent physician didn't believe that Charlotte was sick that she was suffering from nervous depression; therefore, the best courses …show more content…

Charlotte suppresses her mental illness around her husband John by down playing her symptoms when, he was physically around her. This suppression weighs heavily on Charlotte as a result she found it is extremely exhausting. John employed his sister, to physical running the mansion. This again suppressed Charlotte and removed any purpose of keeping her mentally stimulated within the home. Charlotte began to sleep the best part of the day away, only too awake when her husband John returned home in the evening. Charlotte became increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom that she and John shared. The wallpaper described in Charlotte's own words, “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It was dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of –contradictions.” Charlotte was in her height of depression, being in a place that she had no wish to be, and not having freedom to work created this obsession with the pattern of the wallpaper and sunk Charlotte deeper into her mental

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She describes the pattern, and how ugly the color was as well. The imagery that Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is very graphic and descriptive on the yellow wallpaper in the room. Even, though Charlotte Perkins Gilman does mention many times about how the wallpaper looked like. “It is like a woman stooping down and creeping about..” Gilman is describing of how the wallpaper looked like, and as if there was a woman that would creep on her at night.

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The “Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It depicts a woman in a summer estate with her husband and her slow mental deterioration. It's written in a diary format where the author keeps a journal that she must keep hidden from her husband who is also her psychiatrist. The reason for this is she must not use her mind any more than she must. The story starts out where she is an obviously mentally bothered person.

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The design in the wallpaper is seen as prison bars. It symbolizes the limits of what she can say or do. As Gilman states, “But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman,2006). The narrator sees how the women in the wallpaper are trying to get out. Some of the women try to go through the small spaces in the pattern which lead them to be strangled by the pattern to death.

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