Theme Of Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator must deal with several different conflicts. She is diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 221). Most of her conflicts, such as, differentiating from creativity and reality, her sense of entrapment by her husband, and not fitting in with the stereotypical role of women in her time, are centered around her mental illness and she has to deal with them.

The "Yellow Wall Paper "by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression. The setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the driving force in the story because it is the main factor that caused the narrator to go insane.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins describes the story of a woman suffering from a mental illness during the 19th century. The protagonist (an unknown narrator) is a wife and mother suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, diagnosed her with hysteria and he decided to move away with her to start a “rest cure,” at a mansion, isolated from the village. The narrator was powerless against her husband, and he had the authority of determining what she does, who she sees, and where she goes while she recovers from her illness. Throughout the story, the author used stylistic elements, such as strong symbolism, to show how the mental state of the narrator slowly deteriorates and ends

            “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an example of how stories and the symbolism to which they are related can influence the perspective of its readers and alternate their point of view. In the “Yellow Wall-Paper”, the unknown narrator gets so influenced by her surroundings that she starts showing signs of mental disorder, creating through many years several controversies on trying to find the real causes of her decease.

The purpose of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to tell the reader that you can have negative effect on someone’s mental health if they are denied their freedom of expression. This is because the narrator (Jane) was kept in a room that had yellow wallpaper, which she did not like. Soon after being unable to work or write Jane began to see creepy figures in the wallpaper and everyday it got worse, she soon began to see a women trapped in the wallpaper. This began to feed her hallucinations and paranoia that someone else is going to find out about this women, and help her escape the yellow wallpaper. This made Jane insane, she would see women walking around outside, and she soon became addicted to the room and writing about the wall in her journal.

Maybe one of the bigger underlying messages in this short story is confinement, which is represented by one of the bigger symbols,the yellow wallpaper. When Jane begins to first describe the wallpaper she says,”The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow,strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight’(Gilman 3). Jane doesn’t seem to understand what is truly eating at her and causing her depression because she feels suppressed but because it is a social norm she continues to go along with it. The yellow wallpaper is weird at first, it repels her, is revolting to her and it is strange because it seems to represent freement of confinement. Continuing on in the story Jane states, ‘There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will’(Gilman 4). Proving that the wallpaper is

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the narrator, being the main character, as an ill woman. However, she is not ill physically. She is ill in her mind. More than any chemical imbalance that may be present; the narrator's environment is what causes her to go mad.

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story of a woman with a mental illness and her husband’s use of the adverse rest cure. The husband, John, forced her to rest, remain in solidarity and did not allow her to write anything. In

The yellow wallpaper symbolizes Jane’s depression and her struggle with her overwhelming mental illness. At night, Jane lies awake studying the paper desperately trying to keep watch over the woman behind it (316). Gilman shows that Jane’s depression

According to The Washington Post, “About 20 percent of American adults suffer some sort of mental illness each year, and about 5 percent experience a serious disorder that disrupts work, family, or social life” (Washington Post). However, these mental disorders were not recognized and dealt with until the early 1900s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from a mental disorder herself, postpartum depression, which lead her to writing the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. During this time, little to no one knew anything about these illnesses or what it was like to have one. With this story, people could now see inside the life of someone who dealt with this disorder and how it affected them.

In the “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are many of literary techniques that illustrates the theme to express the story. Irony, imagery and symbolism are some literary devices that is presented among the story.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a woman who has a mental illness but cannot heal due to her husband’s lack of acceptance and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The story appears to take place during a time where women were oppressed. Women were treated as if they were under one’s thumb in society during this period which is approximately the 19th century.

In the story that Gilman narrated, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, The theme of A woman is mentally ill, and is not taken serious by her husband is shown by how the main character doesn’t get much attention from her husband. In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”,it says that sometimes John (The husband), tells her to just take some air and rest as much as possible. If john would have taken her serious, then he would try to spend as much time with her as possible. Gilman feel like her husband doesn’t really pay attention to her illness. This makes Gilman seem like a pretty strong person because even though her husband doesn’t take her illness seriously, she still keeps trying to move forward.

The recurring conflict in the short story, leading to the narrator losing her insanity, can be seen in the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, with the narrator’s point of view illustrating her restricted, mundane life and the misunderstanding of her condition that causes her mental health to deteriorate. The narrator clearly depicts the heavy constraints limiting her from expressing herself through her very first diary entry, in which she says “John is a physician, and perhaps-- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? Personally, I disagree with

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman creates a character of a young depressed woman, on the road to a rural area with her husband, so that she can be away from writing, which appears to have a negative effect on her psychological state. Lanser says her husband “heads a litany of benevolent prescriptions that keep the narrator infantilized, immobilized, and bored literally out of her mind. Reading or writing herself upon the wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance” (432). In the story both theme and point of view connect and combine to establish a powerful picture of an almost prison-type of treatment for conquering depression. In the story, Jane battles with male domination, because she is informed by both her husband and brother countless brain shattering things about her own condition that she does not agree with. She makes every effort to become independent, and she desires to escape from the burdens of that domination. The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the character’s point of view in a structure similar to a diary, which explains her time spent in her home. The house is huge and old with annoying yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. The character thinks that there is a woman behind bars in the design of the wallpaper. She devotes a great deal of her