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Essay On The Importance Of The Setting In The Birthmark

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The setting in “The Birthmark” is somewhat important to the story but it is not critical, and the setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is rather significant. “The Birthmark” could be put in any time or place and the message would still become clear but being in the 18th-century, it gives more information about what issues were going on in that time. “Yellow Wallpaper” has a setting critical to understanding the story since it is in the house where she is locked up. The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in 1892. This was when the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had divorced Stetson. She was born in Hartford Connecticut and had a painful and lonely childhood. Charles Stetson had put his depressed wife in the care of a doctor who in her …show more content…

Even though the house is big and is bordered by a garden, hedges, and quarters of the servants, the narrator believes that the house as well as its grounds have gone into “disrepair”. In the beginning, the narrator is attentive to the scenery and the different rooms in the house. Later in the story, she becomes absorbed on the nursery but mainly the yellow wallpaper. The setting is peaceful but is in a place of imprisonment. The windows of the nursery have bars and the bed is fastened to the floor. According to Kathleen Wilson, “the isolated location of the house, its slight state of disrepair, and the narrator’s further isolation in the fortress-like nursery, all symbolize the narrator’s mental condition.”
“The Birthmark” takes place in Aylmer’s Laboratory in the late 1700s. The exact location is unidentified but it is in Britain. It is the late 1700s. Aylmer is a scientist that is obsessed with his work. He then met a woman named Georgina who was perfect besides one thing, a birthmark on her face. They got married but Aylmer’s fixation on perfection took over his love for his wife. He found a way to get rid of the birthmark but it ended up killing Georgina because perfection cannot exist in this

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