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Who Is The Woman In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story where the main character is on a “search for self.” The woman in this story is trying to get ‘better”. She seems to be very disconnected from reality and does not know the severity of her condition but she does know that John is there and wants her to be better, too. As the story continues, she is consumed by the yellow wallpaper in her room and starts to make faces and pictures in it that really aren’t there. She starts seeing pictures of strangled heads and beady eyes. Eventually the speaker starts to see a woman in the wallpaper who is stuck in the paper and is trying to escape. The speaker is spending all her time searching for the woman in the wallpaper thinking she could help her escape. By the end of the story, the patient rips off the wallpaper and goes completely insane but she found her true “self” in the wallpaper. …show more content…

This is seem when she wrote “You see he [John] does not believe I am sick!” She decides the only way to become healthy is to get rid of the sickening wallpaper and help the woman trapped in it. Eventually she just lets the wallpaper consume her entire mind. She thought if she helped the person escape and got rid of the paper, all her problems would go away. The speaker did not realize the person in the wallpaper was just her shadow or that all her thoughts are just the wallpaper even when not looking at it. She spends hours staring at her shadow and hiding from her reflection in the windows. The woman is scared of herself but does not realize it. She could never find herself because she could not identify herself when staring straight at her own face or even remember her own

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Together the themes of manipulation and mental illness will trigger a series of events that change their lives. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and seclusion from human contact. This was a cure that her husband John prescribed that proved detrimental to her mental health. As she spends more time alone in the room, she becomes fixated on the patterns and images, slowly becoming convinced there is a woman behind the wall that is trapped and that she must free, "The front pattern does move—and no wonder!

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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 Yellow Wallpaper” is a first person narrative written in the main characters secret journal, the main character is married to John who has it be, is also her physician; he treats her for depression also ensuring her that writing is bad for her then whisks her away from their home for treatment. “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a great deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” (Gilman 527). John refuses to let her write the only thing that makes her sane, which ultimately makes her increasingly insane and begins the fixation with the yellow wallpaper in her room. At first she just does not like the wallpaper, then it starts to terrify her to where she is seeing people move behind the paper. “The front pattern does move – and no wonder!

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The story” The Yellow Wallpaper” wrote in first -person perspective. The main character is “ I” in the story. This narrator is a crazy, sick, nervous woman, who is asked to live in someplace peaceful by his husband John. The narrator’s husband John is a physician. John never believes that his wife is sick instead of thinking she just need a rest.

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708 Words | 3 Pages

In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a physician convinces his wife that she is sick and must rest in her room as much as possible. She eventually becomes stir crazy and starts believing that there are women trapped inside the wallpaper in her room. She tears it off the wall to set them free, and when her husband finds her, she claims that she is now free too. One of the major themes of this story is that isolation can cause madness and insanity.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist struggles the realization that the perplexity of the woman in the wallpaper is a symbolic version of herself. The title itself suggests that the uncanny will be connected with objects, particularly with the house and the wallpaper: ‘Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it,’ and later: “I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. (Stetson 650)”

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In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson is a short story about a woman who is suffering from depression and is isolated from the world by her husband, who is also her doctor. Throughout the story, the woman provides evidence of her unhappiness and allow the reader to feel sympathetic towards her. The reader resents her husband and sister and believes that the woman should be removed from her abusive situation and be allowed freedom. Nearing the middle and end of the story, the reader begins to side with the husband in his treatment of keeping her inside due to her disturbing behavior, although the reader still sympathizes with the woman and is empathetic to the woman’s situation. This short story was put in the first person perspective of the woman so that the reader could understand how the woman was feeling and they could descend into madness along with her.

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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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In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is put on rest cure for her depression and it eventually leads to her mental collapse due to feeling isolated and trapped in her room. It all began when she saw the yellow wallpaper in the room that was to be her prison. At first, she just despises its color and pattern but the longer she has to stare at it the paper starts to move and eventually someone appears behind the bar-like paper. At the end of the story she sees many women who came from the wallpaper and wonders “if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”(Gillman 474). She believes that she was the one behind the wallpaper and is now free.

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However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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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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779 Words | 4 Pages

The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.

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The woman was obsessed with the wallpaper she begins to hallucinate that something was creeping on her. She had locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in the bedroom with her because she was trying to trap the creeper that she thought she saw. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” say,“‘Open the door, my darling!’ , ‘I can’t,’ said I. ‘ The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf’”

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a young woman who is battling severe depression. The protagonist is essentially locked away for the summer as a cure for her psychological disorder(s) (Craig 36). Being locked in the house with the yellow wallpaper worsens her mental state and eventually drives her to insanity. Throughout the course of the story, the protagonist’s mental state noticeably declines; she claims there are people in the wallpaper and believes it is haunting her. Several Gothic themes are scattered throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”; however, the protagonist’s isolation, the presence of insanity, and the occurring idea of supernatural elements are most prominent and can be used to justify “The Yellow

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