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Yellow Wallpaper Sexism

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Sexism and its Influences on Psychological Abuse The central theme in the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is the distinctive differences of gender roles. Gillman creates an aura of sexism with the deteriorating mental health of the female protagonist due to the male persona. Men dismiss the idea of depression being the culprit of the protagonists’ issue, and rather misdiagnose as if she has hysteria. The entire act of ridiculing the protagonist, isolating her, and furthering her obvious depression, leads to serious psychological problems, which is, in fact, a violent outcome. Within the first few lines of, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gillman introduces the audience to the beloved John, the husband to the protagonist. Instantly, he mocks …show more content…

The narrator is constantly crying, has no appetite, and has insomnia, all of which are symptoms of postpartum depression. The room she abides in, is an old nursery which promotes her deep detest for the room. The indication that she had possibly gave birth, and cannot see her child, expands on the perception of domestic abuse. One may insinuate that the narrator gave birth and her reaction afterwards was deemed as irrational, on the brink of hysteria. John takes it upon himself to say that she is being overly dramatic and places her into solitary confinement, in his poor attempt to heal her. Depression seeps into psychological dysfunction, she begins to hallucinate, seeing images in the wallpaper. “The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes 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.”(Gillman 85). She then imitates her illusions, crawling on the floor in circles, until John finds her and faints on the spot. It can be argued that due to the perspective of the story that there is a bias. Obviously, the narrator is in no condition to provide an accurate story, however, because Gillman chose the protagonist to tell the story, it demonstrations how her thinking alters overtime, how her mental state is obliterated because of her living conditions.

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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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When Ann awakens and realizes the gravity of her acts, she starts to feel guilty since she knows that her adultery was immoral and unfair to her hardworking husband. This feeling of guilt is evidence that she has committed an act of betrayal against her husband. John’s body was found far away from the house, near his pasture fence. Everyone theorized that John must have just missed their house since he was disoriented from the storm, but in truth John was found far from home because he didn’t want his wife to find him. Even in death John cared so much for his

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In spite of the fact the women appear frail throughout the story, they eventually show their strength. In Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John the husband of the narrator in the story moves his wife to a new house shortly after her giving birth. Because John is a doctor he feels as though he knows more than his wife and is completely disregarding her feelings. He stripped her of her identity, and she couldn’t express herself.

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“The texture of the moment was satisfyingly dreamlike; an incredibility perceived as such, yet acquiesced in.” Ann found herself in a trance around Stephen. He seemed to be the adventure she had longed for, and this lust resulted in Ann cheating on her husband. After sleeping with Stephen, a switch seemingly flipped in Ann’s mind. She realized that she meant nothing to Stephen, and her desire for attention blinded her from seeing this.

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The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is written in a journal- entry like format that follows a woman and her descent into madness. The narrator, a woman whose name is not given, is staying with her husband and some more family in an older estate on the countryside in the hopes that it will help her illness, which is describe as “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 473). In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman uses irony—with emphasis on the protagonist’s sarcasm—in order to convey the psychological isolation the woman in the story is facing through mental illness as well as her attitude towards the oppression of women during this time period. Irony is a common literary technique in which the meaning of a statement

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Her husband and her go away, and her husband traps her in a room all day, and all she does is just stare at the wall. Everybody knows that somebody that suffers from depression needs to get out of their room. They need to be surrounded by people they love and with things they enjoy. Her husband never let her talk about the way she felt so she went crazy and started seeing things on the yellow wallpaper.

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Women were thought of as weak and unable, and they did not question a man’s authority. Through the development of this story, it shows how passive women with postpartum depression were treated poorly and it resulted in mentally ill patients rather than healthy ones. The ever changing tone, vivid imagery, and ironic situations all show how the woman comes to understand who she is. The narrator in this story comes to the realization that she is the woman in the wallpaper she has envisioned- trapped in this world by her own husband. To break free of this entrapment, she ripped off all the wallpaper so no one could put her back into her horribly vivid

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Eventually, we realize that the woman in the wallpaper is the narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator 's mental state continues to deteriorate. Being both the narrator 's husband and physician, John assumes that he knows what’s best for his wife. However, in this essay, I will argue that Gilman portrays John as an antagonist or “villain” in her story because, through his actions, he is the main reason for his wife 's descent into insanity which proves that he didn’t know what was best for his wife after all.

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She shines a harsh light on the ill reality of society in this time period. There are different kinds of prisons. Gender roles, mental illness, and struggles with identity can all be something that hold people back and hinder their abilities. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a woman who is treated like she is inferior to her husband, John. He does not think she is smart or

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The house is in a super-isolated place. The house represents the narrator 's personal emotions; restricted and isolation. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the symbolism of the the wallpaper and the diary demonstrate the psychological difficulties, that were caused by being disrespected and thought less of, during the 19th century for women across the United States. In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman 's husband John neglects her symptoms of postpartum and says she has a slight hysterical tendency.

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Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

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In the short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist is a woman who is crippled by a mysterious mental illness that is taking a toll on her health. The protagonist is someone who very much loves to write and she is someone who writes mostly about her thoughts on the room to which she is confined to for treatment by her husband, John. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uses a wide variety of literary devices, including irony, diction, and imagery to effectively demonstrate the theme of the domination of women by men in the 19th Century. After reading the story, the tone with which John talks his wife stand out a lot. John constantly uses belittling phrases such as "little girl" or "blessed little goose" to talk to his wife, portraying not only how he thought about his wife, but also how most men thought of women, them being inferior to men.

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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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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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In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the couple’s marriage is unsteady due to a mental illness of postpartum depression. Throughout the plot, the reader begins to realize there are two sides to the story. First there is the voice of the narrator who expresses her feelings freely; even though eventually she seems to be crumbling. Then there is the voice of her husband John, who seems convinced that the best medical treatment for his wife is the “rest cure”. Analyzing John and the narrator’s perspectives throughout the plot brings insight into the cause of the mental problem.

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