Mental Illness In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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English 1118-54 Online 22 September 2014 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” Mental illness is such a stigma and a taboo in today’s world. No one wants to talk about it, the people that are affected don’t wish to disclose their illness in fear of judgment and the chance of being treated as someone less. Now, let’s go back 122 years to when this story was published. Could you imagine how society felt about mental illness in the late 1800’s? In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” dramatizes Gilman's own struggle with depression, treatment, writing, and living in a male-dominated society. As you read along you can see the wallpaper morphing right along with the narrator. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is probably Gilman's…show more content…
The physical setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" reinforces all of the feelings and the attitudes in the story. "It is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people." (239) It’s a fancy isolated house, but it stands back away from the road, a few miles from town and contains many "locks" and "separate little houses." Since it’s separate from town it would have the feeling of being separated from society. Jane describes the house as a place that binds and restricts. When you think of her emotional frame of mind it is also isolated and restricted. The house’s physical setting is the same as Jane’s’ emotional state. Inside of the house, Jane is confined, by her husband, to a "big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore." (239), however these windows are barred preventing any…show more content…
It represents imprisonment and this is made clear when the she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”. (245) The imprisonment is created from the yellow wallpaper because the Jane repeatedly asks to remove it but isn’t allowed and she is confined to the room she despises due to the stubbornness seen from her husband. You can see Jane slowly descend into her madness with her hallucinations- “The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." (248) “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” (246), obsessions- "I determined for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion."(243), and paranoia- “Of course I never mention it to them anymore, I am too wise, but I keep watch of it all the same." (244) "The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennifer has an inexplicable look.” (246), “I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!” (247) Her obsession with the wallpaper gains momentum because she wasn’t allowed to change it. At the end, John faints when he breaks into the room and sees his wife in the psychotic
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