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Who Is Charlotte Perkins Gilman´s The Yellow Wallpaper?

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Women have also been the most likely to experience a form of depression. And this patient is no different. Today’s case will be centered around “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that tells the story of a woman gone mad for being trapped in a small room filled with yellow wallpaper. This story will be told like any report, and the protagonist will be referred to as a patient in the future. The patient, after research, suffers from postpartum as a result of childbirth and anxiety. The following passages will help elaborate more, with some secondary sources on the way. To start, the first reason the patient went mad was due to giving birth to her newly born son. The story supports this as it begins with the patient, an …show more content…

And that is simply due to the room itself. tells that the patient was secretly writing in her journal behind her husband’s back, and it reveals how she descended into madness. The wife writes about her well-being and that she spends most of her time staring at the wallpaper. She explains that the wallpaper in the bedroom had an odd, unnerving feeling and a smell that she can only explain as “a yellow smell”. It continues with the wife describing the pattern and how she traces it across the room to see where it ends. The wife then says that the wallpaper in certain lighting shows prison bars and how she sees women behind them moving and wanting to escape. She then goes on to talk more about the wallpaper and how she becomes more delusional whenever she thinks about the wallpaper. She told her husband, John, that she was not getting any better and wanted to leave the room. But John keeps on telling her that she looks healthier and that she has to wait until summer is over. The woman still trapped in the room later tears the wallpaper thinking that she is freeing the woman trapped inside. She tore every shred of paper until the room was bare. The wife finishes her journal by explaining that during the final day of their stay, her husband John came to the room and fainted after seeing her all alone creeping around the room. That was all the wife wrote and she confessed to the authorities about her doings. A more suitable family will adopt the woman’s

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The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.

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She slowly starts to fear her Husband, she notes how there is an odd smell that accumulates in her room, and she always references the yellow wallpaper, in that it changes in certain ways. She began to comment on how some parts of the wallpaper was torn, then she progressed to how there were bouts of fungus growing on the walls until she begins to speak of how the pattern on the wallpaper shakes because of the “woman behind it.” “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over,” this is when her sanity is clearly broken. She moves on from talking about her husband, the daylight, and the room itself to only speaking of the women and how she moves around. This clear descent into madness is a byproduct of how she is often dismissed by her husband and brother concerning her

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In Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane, the narrator, is isolated from society as part of her “rest cure” treatment for her postpartum

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The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is put into a room alone, isolated from the outside world with nasty wallpaper, a little table, and a bed. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was admitted to the room because of postpartum depression. The woman says that life is “much more exciting now than it used to be.” When she made this statement it was after she quite literally lost herself and went crazy running around the room and examining the walls deeply. Knowledge of mental health and illness at that time was little to none leading to this very poor way of

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Women were seen as mentally fragile and hysterical, with treatments such as “rest-cures” existing as a means of not “upsetting” the female patient. This sentiment can be seen throughout the story, from the narrator’s diagnosis to the treatment she receives as a result. For instance, the narrator was not properly diagnosed with postpartum depression, but rather what her brother and husband describe as “ temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency"(The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Despite saying that she is sick, her brother and husband quickly dismiss her concerns and tell her friends and family she is healthy.

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Understanding “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins’ Gillman Why does “The Yellow Wallpaper” make such a strong impact and realization about how different postpartum depression was thought about in the past? The Yellow Wallpaper can make a huge impact on someone reading it that is not aware of how different society was in that time period and can really open their eyes to it. The view of depression in women in the late 1800’s was much different than we know it today. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” this is obvious and shows that that story could be seen in a number of families not just the one in the story. The struggles by the lady in this short story really can make an impact of today’s civilization and really put in prospective the differences

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In The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character had many issues with the wallpaper in a room. She felt that it had moved from the bedroom to the living room. The main character was represented as a person that suffered from post-partum depression because she was never near her baby and did not talk about the baby. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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but, he won’t hear it. The narrator starts to believe the lady trapped behind the wallpaper is trying to escape. “the shape of an incarcerated woman in the decor, a doppelgänger image of herself as a powerless, suppressed victim of patriarchy reduced to two dimensions and pasted to the wall. Gradually, horrific outlines appear in the design as the patient hallucinates and regresses to total collapse.” The narrator starts to tear the wallpaper off and finishes by the time her husband comes back.

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The descriptions of the woman in the wallpaper make the reading contemplate if she is actually shaking the wallpaper or if it’s an illusion. This makes the reader feel like the woman trapped in the room: unsure of one’s self and insane. The climax of the story is when the woman tears the wallpaper off the walls and begins to crawl around the edges of the room and over her husband who had fainted. The reader feels uncomfortable with the woman and is incredibly uneasy about the whole

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In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author tells us about a woman that is suffering from an illness that was most likely postpartum depression. The woman of the story in the narrator and this story is written like it was her journal that she kept in secret. She is married to a man named John, who is also the physician that is treating her for her illness. He kept her locked in a room at the very top of the house that was once assumed to be a nursery. It had bars on the windows, scratches on the floor and dull yellow wallpaper.

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As this progresses, the woman starts to go mad from ignorance and starts to believe there is someone behind the Wallpaper. In her room, the narrator starts to obsess over the Wallpaper. The Wallpaper symbolizes women starting to realize how unfair they were treated and how responded to this. As the women’s illness keeps getting subdued by her husband, she starts to go mad and the wallpaper demonstrates this. In the third entry of her diary she says, “Of

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” Literary Analysis The “Yellow Wallpaper” is a iconic short story written by Charlotte Perkins, a famous feminist author. The novel takes place the 19th century and deals with the issue of how women dealt with mental health issues, specifically postpartum depression. Back in the 19th century the way physicians dealt with women 's mental health was much different then it is today, back then they believed that the cure for depression was solvable by isolation and rest. As a result many women suffering from postpartum depression were forced into isolation which only made their situation worse. Jane; the narrator of the short story, is one of these woman forced into the rest treatment by her physician husband.

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The main character addresses the fact that the room, even with its restraining rings and bed nailed to the floor, does not bother her. Instead, it is the yellow wallpaper. The color is an unsightly yellow that vexes the main character mind into further. The main character openly admits that her husband contributes to her mental deterioration by neglecting to acknowledge that there is a problem. In conjunction, she also admits that, in spite of the devoured

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(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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(99). The woman on the floor trying to take the wallpaper down would not let her husband in as he tried to knock the door down, but she does not realize she is doing it to herself. For example, Catherine Golden states in her article that, “The narrator seems detached from the bits of wallpaper on the floor next to her and John wallpaper fragments that could be read as a literal representation of the source of her insanity. The narrator’s hallucinations and action of tearing down the wallpaper to free the woman trapped behind the wallpaper pattern condemn her to madness” (60).

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