The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

As the protagonist suffers from her “nervous condition”, the isolated environment causes her to only get worse. Being trapped in the bedroom with yellow wallpaper contributes her emotional distress to become overpowering. The inability to verbally express her feelings of loneliness causes her to write in a more creative way about her relationships with objects in the room, specifically the yellow wallpaper. She begins to write about the yellow wallpaper as if it is suppose to have some sort of significance, in which it does. In the beginning of the narrator’s isolation, her attention is focused on the details of the yellow wallpaper’s pattern that are “dull enough to confused the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study” (438). The wallpaper’s characteristics become hard to

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist suffers from a lot of mental distress, this is from the effects of postpartum depression. She does not know what is real or not. She finds that in the wallpaper a “faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, [she got up] and went to feel and see if the paper did move” (Gilman 31). Because of this fixation she has around the wallpaper, she starts going into a state of madness. She no longer knows if she’s just seeing things or if it is true.

Throughout the story, she gets increasingly fixated by the wallpaper and it takes up all of her awake time. Ultimately, this leads to her complete mental breakdown as she starts claming to be seeing a woman inside the wallpaper that is trying to get out. Her obsession with this imaginary woman is however only a reflection of herself, her own will to break free from the patriarchal society which she is captured in.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and shows how it changes one’s life forever.

Insanity manifests itself within society in two unsettling scenarios: one being when the true darkness lurking in the inner recesses of one’s mind takes control, and the other being when society attempts to oppress certain peculiar individuals by ascribing mental instability upon the public’s perception of them. Throughout Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," it is rather ambiguous to which of these two nightmarish scenarios the narrator is enduring. From the beginning of the story, the narrator contends that a mental affliction is plaguing her, and later cites this as the primary reasoning behind the decision for her and her husband John, a well respected physician, to move into a seemingly calm colonial mansion for the summer. Once inside, she cannot help but feel uneasy; both intrigued and repulsed by the mysterious yellow wallpaper encompassing her new sleeping quarters. As this once harmless curiosity deteriorates into full blown obsession, our protagonist begins to perceive the ominous wallpaper as the cruel prison to a helpless, enigmatic woman, and by the story’s climax, she attempts to liberate the woman by stripping every last sliver of wallpaper from the room. Externally, it would appear that the narrator has devolved into utter madness by the conclusion, but upon closer examination, it is evident that her mind has in fact attained a newfound sense of clarity. All along, it was her husband, John, that had been her true epicenter of

As I started reading this short story, it clearly introduced who the characters are and where it took place. The narrator is a woman; she has no name, remains anonymous throughout the story. She lives with her husband John in a house. This house is isolated from society, since the short story indicates that it is far from village, roads or any means of communication. It also contains locks and gates throughout. The woman is ill and this illness has placed her in a weak position with her husband and everything around her. We know that she likes to write, but her husband doesn’t let her, so she does it in secret. Although this type of writing is mainly to show mild personality disorder in dealing with life,

Her husband keeps wants her to put down her pen and paper, relax and stay in one room as she is stressed. The doctor and her husband agree that this is the best cure for her depression or mental anguish. All though not really on board with this plan, as she wants to live, she goes along with her doctor and husband’s blessing, holding her feelings inside “But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (Gilman, par. 26). In her husband holding her to this room, which has torn yellow wallpaper, she fades more and more into the faded torn walls “I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wall-paper. It dwells in my mind so” (Gilman, 94). She wants to get to any other room for the longest time, then subsides into blending into the wallpaper and what it possesses in its designs. Eventually, her husband went checking on her, found her creeping around on the floor, and was so astonished that she actually digressed that he

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” both tell us that some women have a lack of independence because of being told what to do, having limitations put on their abilities, and having a family member being an authoritarian figure in their life. Both stories are very similar when discussing the lack of independence that women may have. Women are always being belittled or controlled somewhere.

“You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” A woman writes, frustrated and trapped in a house with hideous, yellow wallpaper. The woman is aware of her own mental illness, yet her husband believes that her "nervous depression" is temporary. As a result, her husband forces her into isolation with her husband and their maid in a house far from society. Trapped in a mansion, the woman anchors herself to an odd thing: the yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. Despite her husband telling her not to, the woman writes pages about the yellow wallpaper. Her description of the wallpaper grows more elaborate each entry. The woman begins by only seeing stains in the wallpaper, then patterns, then movement, then a woman trapped. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is that of a mentally ill woman once strong and observant. Yet, improper treatment and the four walls of a house that became a prison led to her fall.

Throughout history and cultures today, women have been beaten, verbally abused, and taught to believe they have no purpose in life other than pleasing a man. Charlotte Perkins Gillam uses her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a weapon to help break down the walls surrounding women, society has put up. This story depicts the life of a young woman struggling with postpartum depression, whose serious illness is overlooked, by her physician husband, because of her gender. Gillman 's writing expresses the feelings of isolation, disregarded, and unworthiness the main character Jane feels regularly. This analysis will dive into the daily struggles women face through oppression, neglect, and physical distinction; by investigating each section

In Gilman’s story The Yellow Wall-paper, we have a narrator, who is nameless who is telling us how she is brought to a house by her husband John, who is a doctor because he is trying to treat her insanity and depression. John leaves his wife in the house all day, in this room with the yellow wall-paper; he never lets her go outside. The narrator in her journal is writing down what the house is like, and what the room is like and she describes the room as having a bad smell to it, almost like a yellow smell. The narrator describes to us how she sees a woman in the yellow wall paper moving around and the narrator says, When the narrator says this it makes you really wonder if she is going insane because how can there be a person trapped inside

“The Yellow Wallpaper” a short story about a mentally ill women,written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at age 32, in 1892 is a story with a hidden meaning and many truths. Charlotte Perkins Gilman coincidentally also had a mental illness and developed cancer leading her to kill herself in the sixties. The story begins with Jane, the mentally ill woman who feels a bit distressed, and although both of the well respected men in her life are physicians she is put simply on a “rest cure”. This rest cure as well as many symbols such as the Yellow Wallpaper, her journal, and her inevitable breakdown are prime examples of the typical life of a woman in this time period and their suppressed lives that they lived even with something as serious as a

Her husband treats and talks to his wife like a child and calls her by names like "little girl" and other non-sexual or intimate terms. Lacking proper engagement or stimulation, she becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper. She becomes convinced that there is a woman who escaped from the peeling yellow wallpaper and sees herself as this person as well. The pattern in the wallpaper is complex like psycho-emotional state the narrator finds herself and the escape of this is highly symbolic. Her slow descent into mania is symbolic of how women’s conditions worsened by isolation and lack of understanding.

Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.

The mood of the story shifted from nervous, anxious, hesitant even, to tense and secretive, and shifts again to paranoid and determination. Her anxiousness is evident whenever she talks to John. She always seems to think for lengthy time when attempting to express her concerns about her condition to him. The mood shift from anxious to secretive is clear when she writes “I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper.” (9). She wants no one to figure out the affect the wallpaper has on her and she wants to be the only one to figure out its pattern. The final mood shift to determination is obvious when she writes “But I am here, and no person must touch this paper but me – not ALIVE!” (11). She is steadfast in attempting to free the woman from the wallpaper. She even goes as far as to lock herself in the room to make sure that she is not interrupted. The major conflicts of this story are the narrator versus John over the nature of her illness and its treatment and the narrator’s internal struggle to express herself and claim independence. During the entire story her and John’s views about her treatment conflict with each other, especially when it comes to her writing. He even makes her stay in the room upstairs instead of in a prettier room downstairs that she would prefer. She often keeps her views to herself or writes them down in