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Women In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Men and women have been treated differently throughout history. In the 19th century, manual labor was much more prominent than it is today. It is possible that women were viewed as less than men because men traditionally did manual labor. They were considered as the overall weaker sex. Women’s mental state were believed to be weaker and more prone to mental health issues. These fragile women were often overlooked when came to mental illnesses. A woman with severe depression may just be considered sad, or she could just be overworked. It was rarely considered as serious of an illness as it is today. A woman with a mental illness was often overlooked and not treated properly. Mental illness could have been looked at as just another weakness that women have. The Yellow Wallpaper exhibits exactly how women were treated at this time. She may well have been suffering from postpartum depression, yet she was told to rest and wait to be better. She could not get excited or else she may relapse because she was so fragile. It is constantly mentioned how weak she is, and that is what society believed at that point in time. The Yellow Wallpaper was a work that showcased the malpractice of society with …show more content…

It is a firsthand account of a mentally ill woman from this time. She recalls that “[A doctor] sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live a domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours ‘intellectual life a day,’ and 'never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.’" (Gilman 968). A credible doctor believed that if a woman could just rest then her ailment would just fade away. That clearly shows how women were viewed at this time. The fact that society thought of women as fragile little minds that should not stress too much or think too hard shows just how society negligent society can

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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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464 Words | 2 Pages

Many were completing tasks that equivalent the men’s task at the time such as wood chopping or hard work in mills and fields. This significant work difference in types of tasks displays the divide between the physical jobs they had to deal with. One had family household duties to please their husbands. The other had to work in order to earn a wage and a living for themselves in strenuous jobs. The women groups had treatment differences.

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892 Words | 4 Pages

Because “the ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men,” women were considered best suited to the domestic sphere (Hughes). Due to the strengths of women, it was deemed that their job was to maintain the household. Additionally, women were viewed as weaker than men. Women were considered “physically weaker yet morally superior to men” (Hughes). Despite men’s advantage in physical strength, women were considered to have superior moral strength and thus emotional strength and fortitude.

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1122 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout the generation, women have always been trapped in some way or another. In the short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the novel ‘The Awakening’ highlights the struggle of women in the late 1800’s and the early 1900s in society. The Yellow wallpaper is a short story about women giving birth and being imprisoned in a room with a weird view of the yellow wall-paper. This resulted in her hallucination lead to the development of mental illness. By the end of the story, she rips off the yellow wallpaper and kills her husband.

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536 Words | 3 Pages

In the 19th century, the misogynist standards left women in a state where their potential was suppressed. Charlotte Gilman argued against a society where a woman’s mentality and physical health was not fully cared for because of men. She herself had been a victim of these standards causing depression and her journey to not rely on another man shaped her feminist attitude. In 1892, she wrote a piece entitled The Yellow Wallpaper where she unravels the destruction anti-feminist attitudes can cause. By the use of setting Gilman formed her meaning that women deserve not only the same rights but compromise/ To start off, let’s look at the isolated house in the yellow wallpaper

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Furthermore, Gilman’s conditions as a woman of how society perceived women, and how her illness was misunderstood led to her mental illness. In the nineteenth century, female hysteria was a common topic in literature, in which the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper makes reference. Hysteria is a psychological disorder whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization) . The term hysteria has a controversial mental history, as this disease specifically targeted women in the 1900s – to which Sigmund Freud considered a female disease. In the fifth century, Hippocrates related hysteria, as a female disease.

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802 Words | 4 Pages

“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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2263 Words | 10 Pages

Early nineteenth century American Literature proves to be a very appealing subject. My research has focused on a piece of nineteenth century American literature, The Yellow Wallpaper. This story was written by a female author that was seen as an early pioneer for women’s rights. I will analyze the concept of women’s oppression in The Yellow Wallpaper.

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2142 Words | 9 Pages

The Culture of The Yellow Wallpaper Through her many stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, developed the notion of how being a strong independent woman can be inspirational to all. The expression of her personal feelings and opinions behind the guise of a seemingly fictional story brings new life to the story itself. During the nineteenth century, there were many stereotypes of what was expected from women. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman composes the story of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression and finds an infatuation with a wall covered with yellow wallpaper.

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1202 Words | 5 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story told through diary entries of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. The narrator, whose name is never mentioned, becomes obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper in the summer home her husband rented for them. While at the home the Narrator studies the wallpaper and starts to believe there is a woman in the wallpaper. Her obsession with the wallpaper slowly makes her mental state deteriorate. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary devices such as symbolism, personification and imagery to help convey her message and get it across to the reader.

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1106 Words | 5 Pages

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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1387 Words | 6 Pages

Ideas such as women working daily jobs or women in positions of power would have been completely laughed away when this story came out, which I believe goes to show just how far we have come as a society in breaking down those gender roles and norms. That being said, these gender expectations are what made the narrator ill in the first place. Over the course of The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s mental health is in a consistent downward spiral. At the start of the story, she already has an illness called “Nervous Prostration” which she has as a result of these extreme expectations put on her simply because she is a woman.

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1056 Words | 5 Pages

This tells the readers about the imprisonment women had to face and the effort they require to attain the freedom of thought

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916 Words | 4 Pages

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” which was published in the late nineteenth century shows that the women of that time did not have much cultural value. In the story the husband acts more like a father to his wife than a husband. Throughout the story he calls her ‘little girl’ and like a father has rules that must be obeyed. He has locked her up in a nursery room that she hates in a large castle and ordered her not to move from the bed, because she is on a ‘rest cure’ that is supposedly going to help her get over her post-partum depression. Because she is stuck in a room that she despises, she becomes very lonely and even more depressed which causes her to start staring at the wallpaper and slowly become crazy from the isolation.

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872 Words | 4 Pages

The medicalization of women’s bodies may illustrate this best. During the nineteenth century the female body started to be studied as part of research of the medical profession (Bates, & Denmark, 2005). Before then women were primarily in charge of healing women’s bodies, maintaining healthy pregnancies and ensuring birth was successful. With the rise of men physicians, and doctoring seen as a male profession midwives and women healers were evidently pushed aside in terms of the care of other women (Bates, & Denmark, 2005). “As in many other spheres of western thought, the male was taken as the norm and females were found deficient by comparison.”

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