Can architecture truly shape the mental healths of an individual? This question has been brought into light from the novels The Yellow Wall-Paper and The Fall of the House of Usher. The relationship of the main character's mental health to the architecture of the setting in both novels shows a deterioration in character health. The Yellow Wallpaper novel is taken place in a nursery and the wallpaper is described as irritating and provoking. In Fall of the House of Usher, the novel is taken house where you feel a sense of insufferable gloom. The health of the characters can be depicted from these areas and creates a scene of disorder and insanity. In the novel, The Yellow Wall-Paper, the narrator is introduced to the audience as someone who seems normal. She has a husband and a child as well. The narrator begins writing her journal and explaining to us that she has been taken into a summer vacation home wit her husband. She at first describes the house to be an more expensive place and questions their ability to purchase the house. However, she soon begins to explain to us her disorder and how her husband John and her brother as well, doesn't believe in her disorder. John gives her a simple treatment and solution to her issues, he explains to his wife that the treatment she will receive is to do nothing active and that she will get better if she stays in her room in the attic. This room is described as “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge;
Perception of Events in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Fall of the House of Usher
While exploring the Yellow Wallpaper, the progression of the narrator's insanity can be tracked through multiple symbols. She begins visualizing a woman, trapped inside of the wallpaper. Which may demonstrate her state of mind. Her husband John brings out the restrictive nature due to isolation. John in the leader of the house and does all of the work both in and out of the house. Her physical bed shows the chained down nature and lack of ability. While all the factors are taken into consideration, one must think about how it may be physical factors or or in her genes. In today’s society, many people only take the physical factors into consideration but disregard how it may lie within an
The setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” plays a critical role in understanding the story, specifically in the progression of the main character’s psychological illness. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes her room as such:
Picture this: a person who is there in body, but not in mind. This is considered to be a mental illness. The American Psychiatric Association says “Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in thinking, emotion or behavior” (“What”). Throughout the works of literature, numerous writers tie in mental illness in their work to bring back a time in their life that they experienced this. In the short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, both represent Poe and Gilman’s mental illnesses within themselves. The two authors’ mental illnesses impacted their main characters and made them as if they were that person playing the part. Both Poe and Gilman suffered
Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is locked away in an isolated room, which was supposed to cure her mental disorder but instead it makes her worse. With the windows barred and the doors locked she is secluded from society. She wishes to go visit her cousin Henry and
Her original idea was that she could get a scary house to stay in for the summer. Little did she know her husband John had a different agenda. Her stress disorder skews her views but all at the same time she is still very sharp. Obviously, she was smart enough to write and know when she could do it and not be seen. When she moves into the house, John orders her to be on bed rest. Because she is a bit delusional she thinks that the room she is kept in is just an old nursery or gymnasium. The room is very large with a lot of windows. But, the thing that bothers her the most is the yellow wallpaper that she describes as an “artistic sin” (Gilman 381). Her husband is too worried about his own reputation to really help her. Throughout the story the reader can see that the narrator wants to be a strong independent woman. But, in the time that the story took place that was not okay with
Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, is a good example of Gothic Literature because it has a dark and gloomy setting and, and strange supernatural events. For example, in Poe’s story, “I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down-but with a shudder even more thrilling than before-upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eyelike windows.” Page 14. This shows gothic literature because it shows a dark setting in front, and around the house. Therefore, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is Gothic Literature because it’s a dark and strange story.
Everyone around her says she is okay and just needs some rest, but she knows better and so does the author. The Yellow wallpaper is a short, true story about the narrator going through her days in a room with unique qualities. As time goes on, the narrator’s perspective on the room begins to change and morph the reality that she perceives. Her changing perspective is used to describe her mental state throughout the story without directly stating it. The people around the narrator contribute to her sanity loss by giving her the wrong treatment for her disease because they feel they know best.
Throughout history, various works of literature compelled the readers to feel a specific way. The authors used different techniques to illustrate emotions toward their audience. Specifically, Edgar Allan Poe, author of The Fall of the House of Usher, uses literary elements, such as imagery, characterization and word choice, to portray the build up the sense of horror.
The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a nameless narrator who suffers from a temporary nervous condition after giving birth to her daughter and her unstable marriage to John. John her insensitive husband and physician has prescribed a “rest cure” treatment for his wife. John rents a summer mansion and confines his wife to a large nursery, which has an immovable bed, bars on the windows, and walls decorated with hideous yellow wallpaper with an eerie chaotic pattern that appears torn in areas. The narrator feels that activity and
In the opening of The Yellow Wall-Paper, the protagonist begins to explain how she and her husband rarely rent homes for the summer but are doing so because she needs rest and relaxation. This was commonly prescribed by doctors of the time to women with “nervous” disorders during the time that the story was set. This is the major theme of The Yellow Wall-Paper, the woman who is telling the story has been diagnosed with “hysteria”, which often had symptoms of anxiety and depression associated with it, and is chronicling her time spent in the upstairs room that is covered in sun-stained yellow wallpaper.
When one is locked into one single room in a house, one can not only go insane, but also it causes a person to hallucinate and have delusions. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “is the story of an unnamed woman confined by her doctor-husband to an attic nursery with barred windows and a bolted-down bed.” The unnamed woman is not allowed to have anything to do with writing because her husband, John, has forbidden her from it. She does it anyways as her own therapy to remain as strong and healthy as she can. She admits to herself through her writing that she has a sickness. John, the general practitioner, does not truly see how chaotic she is. He believes that locking her into a room will treat her illness and he convinces
In the compelling fiction short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, the narrator is a woman that suffers from a low-grade mental illness but because she is locked away in a room her illness intensifies. The narrator’s husband, John, who is a
Deteriorating towns are generally filled with a mere handful of inhabitants still clinging to whatever life they used to have. Houses fall apart. Quality of life decreases. People become unstable due to their inability to provide for themselves and their families. This has been seen all over: the towns become relics and the people become charity cases. When the going gets tough the tough get going; however, those inhabitants who choose to stay rewrite their endings. Edgar Allan Poe’s use of imagery portraying decay in “The Fall of the House of Usher” serves to set up the final fate of the two main characters.
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