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Themes Of Horror And Supernatural In The Yellow Wallpaper

501 Words3 Pages

Many authors enjoy and use the themes of horror and supernatural to create vivid, effective plotlines. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” the theme of horror reveals Gilman's views towards women treatment and oppression in her time. The genres of horror and supernatural in Charles Dickens “The Signalman” reveals the evils and destructive force of new technology. Both short stories reveal problems in the author's society they feel needs to be fixed. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator writes and speaks in a journal entry format. This helps reveal to the narrator digression of sanity towards the end of the story when her husband faints at the sight of her breakdown and declaration of “I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back”. Gilman also explores horror through the narrator’s progressive obsession with …show more content…

In “The Signalman” horror and supernatural is explored through the rambling of the signalman and his ghost at the danger line. The ghost is revealed to the narrator to be linked as a warning of something bad about to happen, mostly the death of many or someone. First with the accident in the line “appearing six hours after the appearance”, then with the young lady dying “instantly in one of the compartments”, concluding with the death of the signalman himself. Dickens uses the train to symbolize the destruction and inhuman nature of technology by connected it with the deaths and the ghost’s attempt to warn people from it. The authors used foreshadowing throughout the story to prepare the reader for the death of the signalman amplifying the suspense and horror of the spectre as the signalman loses his sanity to his paranoia. To the point where even the narrator questions his state of mind, “how long might he remain so, in his state of mind”. This further emphasizes the evils technology can have of the body and

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Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1862 Words | 8 Pages

There are many events that can foreshadow the rest of one’s life for the better, or, for the worst. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane (the narrator) struggles with a mental illness that causes her to become very weak so her husband, John, takes her to a country home to heal. While at the house she stays in a room that has old yellow wallpaper. Jane is deeply disturbed yet highly intrigued and maintains her deep inspections of the wallpaper as she stays there.

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Essay Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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According to Loralee MacPike, in the article “Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” which appeared in American Literary Realism 1870-1910 in 1975, “The story line is deceptively simple” (1). The diary-like entries provide a sense of comfort and familiarity in the beginning, eventually revealing the protagonist’s descent into madness. Gilman’s choice to present the story in a diary-like format creates a false sense of security for readers. By drawing them into the protagonist’s innermost thoughts and experiences, Gilman establishes an empathetic connection between readers and the protagonist. As the narrative unravels and the true nature of the protagonist’s situation is revealed, this sense of security is shattered, leaving readers to think about the unsettling conclusion.

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Physical Entrapment In The Yellow Wallpaper, By John Gilman

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Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity. In addition to physical descriptions, a sense of identity can be established through the delivery of relationships with others, and moral beliefs. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the interplay of characters plays a key role in defining the narrator’s identity through the imbalance of power in her marriage with John. Gilman arguably presents the narrator’s descent into madness through her inability to create a new identity counter to John’s entrapment of her.

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Tone Of The Yellow Wallpaper

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The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a portrayal of a woman’s descent into madness and how the society around her contributes to her illness. As a matter of fact, the story was inspired and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own personal experience. Gilman’s use of a first person point of view and tone allows the reader to experience and understand the narrator's actions and situation. The narrator’s tone also plays a role in establishing her character and the theme through the paragraph structure, her thoughts and expressions and finally her ironic expressions. To begin with, the narrator's tone helps establish character through her paragraph structure within the story.

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Due to this, darkness has been imbedded with the connotation of fear, death, and evil. However, Charlotte Gilman takes a different approach in her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". She shows that darkness can not only take on the aspect of fear, but it gives us a certain freedom we are not allowed in daylight. It has the power to distort our vision and change perceptions. Her story is about the obsessiveness of a depressed woman to aged yellow paper in her bedroom.

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1712 Words | 7 Pages

In the final scene of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the text shifts to a dialogue, rather than the previous diary entry writing style, and the narrator is seen circling the nursery and identifying with the woman within the wallpaper (591). With the switch in narrative format, the reader can understand that a significant shift has occurred, and it seems logical that with this shift, the narrator has fully slipped into madness. Additionally, because the previous narrative format was composed of diary entries, the narrator was able to mentally process and describe her lifestyle. But, with her descent into madness, she loses mental clarity. Although the last scene of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written from a first-person perspective, which is consistent with the diary entries, the combination of the shift to dialogue and the narrator’s actions suggest that the narrator has lost her grip on reality.

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Mental Deterioration In The Yellow Wallpaper

1014 Words | 5 Pages

Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is battling several interwoven conflicts throughout the text. If one of these internal or external struggles been resolved, the conclusion of the short story could have been different from the final mental deterioration at the end. Conflicts faced by the narrator within “The Yellow Wallpaper” include her declining mental health, her husband’s dismissal and neglect of her concerns about her mental state, and her inability to perform the gender roles assigned to woman living in the early 1900s. The severity of the narrator’s mental state is developed throughout the whole of the story.

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1414 Words | 6 Pages

The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”

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The Yellow Wallpaper Intimacy Analysis

720 Words | 3 Pages

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The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

502 Words | 3 Pages

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