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Understanding Mary's Mental State In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Cost of Suppression: Understanding Mary's Mental State in The Yellow-Wallpaper

In a short-story ahead of it’s time, an unwell wife named Mary experiences near constant suppression and mistreatment. Her male counterpart and lifetime companion John, undermines her mental and physical abilities to such an extent that she is driven to extreme measures. This societal oppression becomes apparent when a deeper look is taken into what “equality" used to look like. A textbook example that perfectly represents how unjust day to day life was for women, is Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s, The Yellow Wall-Paper. Published in 1892 this work of feminist literature sheds light on the societal and cultural oppression experienced by women during the late 19th …show more content…

Mary's visions of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper can be interpreted as a metaphor for her own confinement within the patriarchal system. “Nobody could climb through that pattern.” (Stetson, 8). This ‘woman behind bars’ hallucination implies that women cannot escape a system engineered to work in favour of men, none of them can climb through and overcome oppression. Furthermore, her hallucinations and delusions can be seen as a coping mechanism for dealing with the trauma of her oppression. Mary internalizes her own oppression by projecting it onto the woman she perceives behind the wallpaper, leading her to take extreme measures to ensure that John does not trap her again, exclaiming that she has “got out at last.” (Stetson, 10). This can be inferred as escaping the cycle of overruling and silencing. Collectively, her obsession with the wallpaper embodies her desire to get away from the gender norms that she is forced into and escape her inequitable lifestyle. “And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Stetson, 10). She mentally achieves this desire when she destroys the metaphysical representation of her

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Repressions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the narrator and her husband John help express a variety of themes addressing marriage, gender roles, and gender discrimination. The short story starts with the narrator and her husband moving into a colonial mansion for the summer. They do this to improve the narrator’s health. Stetson does not tell the readers what the narrator’s illness is; however, from the story it appears as if the narrator is mentally unstable and nervous.

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Prescribing Madness: Analyzing The Damaging Relationships In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a haunting portrayal of the dangers of the 'rest cure' treatment for women with mental illness in the late 19th century. To showcase these dangers the story follows an unnamed narrator whose journal entries document her descent into madness as she is prescribed the rest cure and confined to the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a colonial mansion by her husband and physician John. By examining the doctor-patient and husband-wife relationships of the two, as well as John’s actions and the narrator's emotional state, it is made clear that Gilman is critiquing the patriarchal societal norms

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Throughout the story, her own concerns for her mental health are diminished and written off as simply nervousness that will eventually go away. The lack of proper care for her and her involuntary confinement to the room with the yellow wallpaper eventually causes the woman to end up in full psychosis, characterized by hallucinations of a woman trapped within the paper. The woman seen within the paper not only represents the actual woman’s need for a voice to give her freedom but also her inability to escape the constraints of the patriarchal standards being imposed upon her. It is not until she completely loses herself to the delusions and finds herself tearing down the wallpaper that she feels she has escaped her own husband’s constraints. Gilman uses symbolism in the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to convey that within a world with insane standards and rules, a woman’s only reasonable option is to go insane

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Passage Analysis #1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman, in this particular passage of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” explores the theme of female oppression through imagery and symbolism of the wall-paper. These elements of literature make the wall-paper come to life for both the narrator and the audience. “The front pattern does move”(55) personifies the wall-paper to be so animate and physically restraining that the woman behind it must shake it to attempt to escape. The italicization of “does” serves to further affirm that the wallpaper exhibits restrictive human-like behaviors - particularly those of dominant men in society. The narrator states that there are “a great many woman behind”(55), extending the metaphor to all Victorian women in the United States and others around the world who are oppressed.

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The text includes themes of insanity, patriarchal control, women's repression, and control, which the author, Perkins, expressed in her text as a way to inform the reader of the societal and patrilocal impacts they were having on women. The narrator is married to a physician named John, who tells her that they have a sickness that can be cured by being forbidden to do any “work” until they are well again. Despite being told not to “work”, the narrator writes a diary with their thoughts throughout the days describing their opinion of the nursery room, with the entries going with the narrator describing a woman in the wallpaper attempting to escape and they try to help by peeling the wallpaper off only to see multiple women creeping around resorting to tearing the wallpaper anyway possible; biting or tearing until John arrives and faints due to the shock of the state of his wife. A passage describes the unequal relationship that the narrator and John have, with the narrator explicitly stating that they don’t feel sick only to be laughed at by John, saying “John laughs at me, of course, one expects that in marriage”, with this line going into the societal views which go into the superego of a person. The superego is a preconscious activity that follows the ideals and morals a person may have, with this case going into the societal views during the Progressive era where the patriarchy views women as being acquiescent to the men in their relationships.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper presents a number of forms of control that the narrator is confronted with throughout the story. The forms of control presented in this story serve to demonstrate the oppressive weight of the patriarchy experienced by women at the time The Yellow Wallpaper was written. Gilman displays patriarchal control in both physical and psychological forms. She also presents a narrator who has internalized these oppressive expectations and her descent into madness which allows her a glimpse at freedom.

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Character analysis over the Yellow Wallpaper The unnamed narrator which is also the protagonist of the short story “Yellow Wallpaper” shows inferiority to her husband John throughout the entirety of the story. Her husband John, limits the amount of creativity she is “allowed” to have. He does this by not allowing her to write although the narrator still does in fact write but only when she knows she can get away with it. The narrator wants to go outside she wants to interact with other people yet she will not stand up for herself which shows great inferior to John. Which of the time period that was almost the normal the men made the rules but it was also a time period where women were pushing equal rights.

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The yellow wallpaper in the room the narrator despises, is a reflection of women’s status in society, being trapped under the power of males. The narrator lost all of her freedom to John. John has gotten to such a point of control where she cannot even pick who she can spend time with and where she can sleep. After John told her she could not, the narrator started writing down her thoughts and her mental illness was getting so bad to the point where there has been “things in that paper that nobody knows but [her].” The narrator is now completely insane because of her husband.

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Secondly, throughout the story, the narrator describes seeing an evolving woman trapped inside of the wall. Although readers can assume that this woman is merely a product of the narrator’s mind, the woman can also be seen as a symbol of the narrator and her feelings of being trapped. Eventually, the woman in the wall aids the narrator in her escape. In conclusion, many elements of the narrator’s increasing madness throughout The Yellow Wallpaper contributed to her freedom from the confines of the room, the confines of society, and the confines of her

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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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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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In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents how wretchedness is overlooked and changed into blended sentiments that eventually result in a significantly more profound enduring incongruity. The Yellow Wallpaper utilizes striking mental and psychoanalytical symbolism and an effective women's activist message to present a topic of women' have to escape from detainment by their male centric culture. In the story, the narrator's better half adds to the generalization individuals put on the rationally sick as he confines his significant other from social circumstances and keeps her in an isolated house. The narrator it's made out to trust that something isn't right with her and is informed that she experiences some illness by her own significant other John.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high

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