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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. At the beginning of the story, the narrator's paragraphs are long …show more content…

The woman is forbidden to have any sort of creative outlet as it would “help” with her recovery, although she continues to write in her diary to express herself and keep herself sane. Her tone in the diary entries clearly represent her change in character from the beginning of the story to the end. To illustrate, during the beginning of the story she is incredibly imaginative and envisions the beauty in everything she sees. For instance, she describes their hereditary estate as a “haunted house” which “reaches the height of romantic felicity.” Additionally, she imagines that her room in the attic with barred windows, destroyed wallpaper, and a nailed down bed was previously occupied by little children, when it easily could have been for an insane individual. The narrator had always despised the wallpaper in her room although as the story went, she began characterizing the wallpaper using human-like qualities which began her obsession with the wallpaper, and the extreme deterioration of her mental health. To illustrate, she stated the pattern looks like “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down.” Near the end of the story, her entries clearly describe her sinking into her own madness and her mental illness taking control of her. Some quotes she wrote explaining this include the following. “The front pattern does move- and now wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,-not alive!” “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise but the bars are too strong even to try.” All of these quotes establish her character at the end of the story when she descends into madness and allows her mental illness to take her

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She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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The heavy bedstead, which was nailed to the ground, was another feature that represents the room as a jail cell. Therefore, the room that she is prisoned shows how the madness benefited her to gain control and achieve a way to escape her confinement. In conclusion, the diverse literature 's do share a common theme that shows women fighting to overcome societal expectations due to the female gender not valued as thinkers capable of being their equals and mental illness can be caused by society’s stereotypical

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In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end.

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So if she gets caught she won’t be able to write anymore, and will go mad even faster. As the narrator writes in her diary, she explains that she doesn’t want to accept the fact that she isn’t okay. Her husband would tell her nothings wrong with her, to not worry, this nervous depression will go away. The only thing that helps is distractions, which is writing for her.

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“I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy…the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman). When she’s locked away in her room, the character analyzes every little detail on the wallpaper, trying to interpret the patterns in it. The details that she sees portray her role as a woman, going against social norms and declaring her independence from society and her husband. She is no longer inferior or

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The wallpaper is affecting her mental state. She really believes that there is a living human being trying to escape from the wallpaper. Once her husband mentions that they only have three more weeks at the house the narrator is determined to solve the wallpaper before then. She believes that the women is being held inside the paper because the pattern is bars that are trapping her in. The main character has become so obsessed with the wallpaper that she doesn’t even sleep anymore all she does is study the wallpaper.

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Gilman’s protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is experiencing a form of nervous depression. Her husband, John, puts her on bed rest in their summer house. The narrator has never seen this house before and is astonished that her husband was able to afford it. The narrator describes

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The Yellow Wallpaper Reflective Journal The short story ‘’ The Yellow Wallpaper’’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts how the narrator in the story is suffering from a psychiatric condition and has been brought to a colonial mansion for the summer by her husband who is also a physician (as described by the narrator) tending to her illness. The story tells us how the narrator’s desires to write and do anything active are suppressed by her husband however the narrator finds a way around it and starts to maintain a secret journal which can be proven from the text since the story is in the form of a diary. The way some things are described by the narrator makes me feel that she is not in a colonial mansion. This essay focuses on the unusual description

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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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Not following the instructions given to her by her doctor and being confined in this area has caused some sort of mental build up. The wallpaper driving her crazy, suffering a mental illness, and having such an isolated lifestyle in a house isolated from the main villages has put thoughts into her head that she believes, like being the woman in the wall. That was the effect; the cause of all of this is simply because she wanted something to do after having her whole life changed for a few months, so she went to the

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work of fiction, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892 is based on Gilman’s personal experiences after receiving a hysteric diagnosis, and a "rest cure" that prohibited her from writing. In the story, the narrator receives a similar diagnosis and treatment from physicians, John, and her brother. The narrator opens her confidential diary entry by praising the grandeur of the home and grounds her husband has rented for their summer vacation; however, this place soon shifts to the setting where we see the narrator begin to dissociate with reality. The narrator's gradual descent into psychosis is symbolized by her obsession with the yellow wallpaper, the women in the wallpaper, and her unconscious actions.

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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 story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.

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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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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, Jane, has postpartum depression. In order to cure this depression, John, Jane’s husband and a doctor, administer the rest treatment on her. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her personal experience. Along with writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” she wrote an explanation for why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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