The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story set in a 19th century colonial mansion, in which the narrator and her husband stay for the summer. The narrator, who is unnamed, is undergoing a rest cure for some kind of mental illness after giving birth. This mental illness is now known as postpartum depression. Rest cure involves doing absolutely nothing and this triggered the further deterioration of the narrator’s mental health. Her husband, John, monitors her condition while they stay in the mansion. She is confined in a room— supposedly a nursery room— with barred windows and scratches on the floor. The most noticeable feature of the room by the narrator is the yellow wallpaper. Each day, her description of the yellow wallpaper becomes more disturbing; from being just plain wallpaper to being a prison cell for trapped women, shaking the bars, wanting to be free from it. Instead of getting well from the rest cure, the narrator’s mental state worsened as what is depicted in her journal entries. She eventually goes mad and her husband fainted from the sight of her condition.
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This is most recognizable within the sixth journal entry of the narrator: “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes” (qtd. in Gardner 83). Remember that the rest cure she is undergoing prevents her to do anything aside from endlessly observing the yellow wallpaper and secretly writing on her journal. Nobody, even John, notices that the rest cure is doing her more harm than cure— and she is the only one who can say that it is the actual case. The quoted text epitomizes the fact that her condition is getting worse each day and nobody listens to her because she is a woman. As what is discussed in class, the oppression of women then caused some women to lose their
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a time period where the men were in charge and woman were looked down upon. The narrator in the story is misdiagnosed with hysteria by her husband John who is a physician. After she had her baby, John keeps the narrator his wife in a depressing, worn own out, faded color of the yellow room with bars on the window. He takes away what the narrator wants to do the most is write. As time goes on the narrator sees a woman inside her wallpaper so she goes and rips it down to save her. Her husband thinks she is going insane and passed out when she told him what she has done.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, a young woman and her husband rent out a country house so the woman can get over her “temporary nervous depression.” She ends up staying in a large upstairs room, once used as a “playroom and gymnasium, […] for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” A “smoldering unclean yellow” wallpaper, “strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” lines the walls, and “the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes [that] stare at you upside down.” The husband, a doctor, uses S. Weir Michell's “rest cure” to treat her of her sickness, and he directs her to live isolated in this strange room. The
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story that is said to be capable of driving a person mad. In the story a woman is taken to the countryside with her husband who is also her doctor, to help with her postpartum depression. She is isolated in this room with barred windows, a nailed down bed, scratches on the floor, and an eerie wallpaper. With complete isolation the woman is driven to the point where she sees a woman in the wallpaper and it eventually drives her completely mad. It then suddenly concludes to show the reader that she has cracked and the very treatment that was supposed to make her better was actually the driving force for her insanity. This story is a great depiction of what women went through during the late
John, the narrator’s controlling, but loving, husband represents the atypical man of the time. He wants his wife to get better and to be able to fill the role of the perfect wife that society expected from her. John, being a doctor, did not quite believe that her mental illness was out of her control and insisted on
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a fictionalized autobiographical account that illustrates the emotional and intellectual deterioration of the female narrator who is also a wife and mother. The woman, who seemingly is suffering from post-partum depression, searches for some sort of peace in her male dominated world. She is given a “rest cure” from her husband/neurologist doctor that requires strict bed rest and an imposed reprieve form any mental stimulation. As a result of her husband’s controlling edicts, the woman develops an obsessive attachment to the intricate details of the wallpaper on her bedroom wall. The woman’s increasingly intense obsession with
The narrator further comments “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do...Personally, I disagree with their ideas.” This quote shows how much influence John has over the narrator’s actions and how much control John has over the thoughts of his families and friends. Not only can one see John’s control over his wife and relatives, but one can also see the narrator’s take on everything. The narrator further comments “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus but John says that the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house.” This quote not only exemplifies the control John has on the narrator’s decisions but also the extent to which the narrator realizes she has a problem. Furthermore, the story is titled the yellow wallpaper which is located in the room that she lives in. By telling the narrator to ignore her illness and do nothing, John starts the narrator on the path to complete mental
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper depicts the tale of a woman confined to the old nursery in her family's colonial mansion (Gilman 1997: 1f.). She was diagnosed with " a slight hysterical tendency", a popular diagnosis in women towards the end of the 19th century, and now recounts her experiences during her condition's treatment in the form of journal entries (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). Over time, the treatment's strict limitations and lack of contact with the outside world begin to influence the woman's sanity negatively, continuously accelerating her deterioration until the situation escalates violently at the end of the story (Gilman 1997: 1f., Teichler 1984: 61). The progress of the
The Story behind the Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the main character who is a woman in her middle age that struggles with nervous depression and hopes to find some relief and relaxation in a old room with this mysterious yellow wallpaper. This short strory brings across different characters that provide both happy and sad endings by their actions throughout the story. The narrator of the story is presented in first person through the woman who has temporary nervous depression, as the story comes to a conclusion she becomes happy and she’s finally free. Her husband John has a very opposite ending, he learns what is really wrong with his wife and in the end his world comes crashing down.
In the grips of depression and the restrictions prescribed by her physician husband a woman struggles with maintaining her sanity and purpose. As a new mother and a writer, and she is denied the responsibility and intellectual stimulation of these elements in her life as part of her rest cure. Her world is reduced to prison-like enforcement on her diet, exercise, sleep and intellectual activities until she is "well again". As she gives in to the restrictions and falls deeper into depression, she focuses on the wallpaper and slides towards insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story written from a first-person perspective about a young woman's mental deterioration during the 1800's and
Mental illnesses causes a person's personality to change. Issues like depression and anxiety will force a person to stay in bed all day. It can also head in the opposite direction, and drive a person to perform dangerous activities, like drink. A desire for revenge combined with a mental illness is a recipe for a disastrous situation. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the woman suffers from post-partum depression.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper depicts the tale of a woman confined to the old nursery in her family's colonial mansion (Gilman 1997: 1f.). She was diagnosed with " a slight hysterical tendency", a popular diagnosis in women towards the end of the 19th century, and now recounts her experiences during her condition's treatment in the form of journal entries (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). Over time, the treatment's strict limitations and lack of contact with the outside world begin to influence the woman's sanity negatively, continuously accelerating her deterioration until the situation escalates violently at the end of the story (Gilman 1997: 1f., Teichler 1984: 61). The progress of the
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’.
In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The protagonist undergoes many hardships throughout the story, Hardships such as the mistreatment that the main protagonist has to face, also how the story portrays the stereotypical behaviour that society shows (i.e., man does everything while the woman does nothing), lastly the psychoanalytic that Sigmund Freud has shown through is work. Firstly, The story shown us that the main protagonist had to experience a lot of mistreatment, with John her husband not allowing her to write as freely has she pleased, or how the main protagonist disliked her room and wanted to leave, John did not listen to her and let her live in the room. Quotes such as, “There comes John. And I must put
Also, we can relate the woman in the wallpaper to the narrator because she is free to do what she wants because John is not there, but during the night she is locked up in her room much like the woman in the wallpaper. These circumstances in which the narrator was put under during the late 1800's would not have been an oddity, and therefore I believe many women just as the narrator did would have had problems go undiagnosed.
Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely