Analytical paper # 2 Due: October 24, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a young woman whose creative appeal and self-expression are suppressed by her society and her marriage. The short story is told by the narrator through her diary, which she describes as an exemption of her thoughts. The narrator is apparently artistic and creative as can be seen through her animated descriptions of the house her husband John has rented. The narrator includes representations of the yellow wallpaper in the upstairs nursery where she and her husband sleep at night. The wallpaper is used characterically to reflect the marriage the narrator finds herself ambushed inside.
Short Story Analysis Have we ever read a story that just didn’t make sense at all when first read? That the descriptions in the paper just create vivid pictures in our mind that are kind of disturbing. That is exactly how this short story was constructed. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author uses symbolism, imagery, irony, and theme to show the subordination and trapped role of women in domestic life. Gilman uses symbols to explain the how women are trapped in domestic life.
old in the first-person perspective as a series of journal entries, the story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband, John, believes that it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure after the birth of their child. She may be suffering from what would now be called postpartum psychosis. The family goes to spend the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it." She is confined to an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery, as the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched.
The story begins in a mental hospital or a sanatorium where Holden is describing the sequence of events that led to his current psychological state to a psychiatrist. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, tells a story of a female narrator, whose name is unknown, that is suffering from depression or a “nervous condition”. Not only does she suffer from depression, but she suffers from her marriage as well. Her husband, who is also her doctor, belittles her and her condition .She and her husband leave to stay in an estate over the summer for vacation and a place for her to get better. The room she stays in has yellow wallpaper that will later contribute to her psychological downfall along with the oppression felt from her environment.
Then when she grows up she has a baby and Madame Valmonde goes to visit her and her baby. Armand, being a slave owner when realizes that the baby is not white meaning that Desiree is not white he tells her to leave the house. Desiree feels sad and desperate because of the situation and writes to her mom for help. She tells Desiree to come home with her baby. Later on, Armand burns anything that belongs to Desiree and feels like he doesn’t love her anymore just because the shame she brought to his family.
But what if you cannot believe the person telling the story? What if the story itself is not meant to be simply read, but translated? The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story that should be taken for what it is: the diary of a madwoman, but should not necessarily be believed as it is told. Charlotte Perkins Gilman penned this, what could be called a quasi-autobiography in 1892, as a “message from experience” to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a physician who treated Gilman’s ‘nervous disorder’ and prescribed his ‘rest cure’ to her in 1887: she was desperately pleading with him and others to alter this treatment, with warning of its horrific and detrimental effects. The dramatic and situational irony found over and over throughout the text in both narrative content and style are what in effect finally show the reader this story is not to be taken at the narrator’s word: a husband and wife lease a mansion for the summer so she can ‘rest’ to cure her ‘nervous condition’; family and servants tend to her, her baby and her duties- while she quietly obsesses about wall paper.
Jamie Christopher Dorothy Byrom English 1101-27 September 19, 2012 The Bars on the Window In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, readers discover a unique symbol. The symbol discovered is the window and, more so the bars placed on it. The plot of the “Yellow Wallpaper” includes a young woman who, trapped in a house is unable to do anything but rest. As she rests she writes even though she is not supposed to and readers see her decline into what seems to be insanity. The window’s bars show the narrator trapped in her situation when bars are usually on windows to keep people out, not in.
Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from depression and how severely her condition is misunderstood by those around her. The setting of the story is in itself a character in the narrator’s story. The old mansion with the yellow wallpaper has many symbols used by the authors to explain the desperation of the narrator’s desperate loneliness. The ironic part of this tale is that her cure of “rest” only pushes the narrator further into her madness. The woman in this story is an ironic symbol of all women in her time, she is unheard and alone in her illness.
The Yellow Wallpaper “The Yellow Wallpaper” opens with the narrator, an unnamed woman, her husband John, their baby, and her sister-in-law Jennie moving into a summer estate. The narrator is suffering from post-partum depression but her doctor husband diagnoses her as “sick”. That was the diagnosis during that time because mental illness in women was not seen as real. He prescribed a rest cure and forbids her to have any form of mental stimulation, no reading or writing, and no seeing her new born baby. She believes that excitement, change, and mental stimulation would do her good but what she feels is disregarded by John.
William Miller February 27, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” A Critical Analysis 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 un-named woman is to spend a summer away from home with her husband in what seems to be almost a dilapidated room of a "colonial mansion" (Gilman 832). In order to cure her "temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency" (Gilman 833) she is advised to do no work and to never to even think of her condition.