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Themes In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Throughout short fiction, Charlotte Gilman is most famously noted for her ability to create strong gothic themes in her writing. This is especially true in her 1890s story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Overall, an important theme in Charlotte Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that when combined, isolation and oppression often lead to negative consequences such as insanity and mental instability. Gilman achieves this through her thorough use of symbolism and settings that helps to highlight and establish the overall theme. As often seen in the 1800s, the role in which women played amongst society was often minuscule, and unheard of compared to their male counterparts. This is exactly the case in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In a time …show more content…

“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there really is nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?” (Gilman 317) Confined in the upstairs bedroom, left to just her thoughts and shreds of grotesque yet enchanting wallpaper, Jane begins to slip into a downward spiral of insanity and depression. Gilman in turn uses this setting of the dilapidated nursery in order to express the extent of solitude Jane experiences when left alone that leads to her mental instability. Not only is Jane separated from the main floor of the house, the home is located in the country, miles from any town or society. Gilman does this in order to express the lack of social interaction Jane experiences in general, and on a regular basis. With walls covered in shredded wallpaper, the nursery Gilman describes is far from being appealing. “The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots… Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.” (Gilman 320) Confined in a room that only has an old bed and desk, Jane has little to do other than write, and fantasize about the images that she begins to see in the wallpaper. By providing minimalistic furniture, Gilman adds to the overall setting of isolation. Not only is Jane cutoff from society, but bars on the windows prevent her physical escape. Gilman notes this key feature in order to show how the narrator can look upon the outside world, but yet not fully participate. Through the use of setting, Gilman directly shows the effect of janes seclusion that eventually leads to her own

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Gilman incorporates the literary techniques of tone and diction to provide the reader with a clear understanding of how the narrator falls into the beliefs of society, while she is confined and oppressed by her husband’s diagnosis of her being “Nervously Depressed”. Gilman’s use of both techniques allows the work to come together as a whole, and demonstrates the idea that women are content with living in a world were men is seen as more intelligent, able-minded and higher in standard than woman,

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To develop the setting of the house, Gilman uses vivid diction to craft an image of the house to show how men a imprisoning the minds of women in Victorian society. Gilman introduces the house as a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity” (1066). Although her description uses the words “romantic felicity” which seem to carry a light tone, these words are preceded by the dark statement that the estate is a “haunted house”. By contrasting these two tones, Gilman foreshadows that the house in which the narrator is interned for treatment might seem magnificent and grand, but in reality, the house and the rest cure will turn out to be her doom. The foreshadowing hints that Gilman uses the contrasting description of the house to point out how physicians like John are oppressing women by denying them their right to a postpartum experience with their baby, a thing of “romantic felicity,” and instead, turning it into an ordeal as nightmarish as a “haunted house.”

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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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