Jagroop Singh Carolina Ruiz English 1302 25 February 2013 Response Paper 3 “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman written long back in 1892 is story of woman struggling from mental dispersion and her husband john is her doctor for the treatment. In my opinion john treat his wife like a small girl and take care of her very sincerely. Woman also thinks john care about her as in her lines “he is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction”. (Gilman 545). But in my opinion I think her husband is the main cause of her illness as he doesn’t let her think anything and just sit alone in room with a yellow wallpaper on the wall.
The setting of the story was on an “eat-out” Thursday night and Mary is settled in her cozy and tidy living room waiting patiently for her husband to come home from work. Mary even prepared his favorite drink on the ready; ice, sparkling water and whiskey, to ease her husband’s tension from a day’s hard work. Unfortunately, this night was different because Patrick took a second helping of his drink. The rising action started when Patrick sat his wife down, and gave her the shock of her life. Selfishly he expected, his wife, Mary to not place too much responsibility upon him and said, “…there needn’t be any fuss.
Once the woman character in this short story develops her own sense of control apart from her husband she can plan her flight to freedom. This occurs when she rebels and rips down the wallpaper that has driven her insane. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is told by a woman whose husband, a physician, confines her to the upstairs bedroom of a house the family has rented for the summer. Forbidden from working and thinking, the woman begins to crave stimulation. Her husband, John, confines her to the nursery, because he treats her as a child, “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore.
The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Paved the Way for Later Generations Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a partial autobiography. Appropriately, this short story is about a mentally disturbed woman and her husband's attempts to help her get well. He does so by convincing her that solitude and constant bed rest is the best way to cure her problem. Atrocious yellow wallpaper covers this room and it aids in her insanity. The woman is writing the story to express her insane thoughts against her husband's will.
Throughout the story, readers gradually learn that the narrator is an imaginative woman who is suffering from mental breakdown and post-partum depression. As the story progresses, she is absorbed into the yellow wallpaper and sinks into her inner fascination. More importantly, readers can see that the narrator is always controlled by her husband, which she is not allowed to do certain things. In the story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, it illustrates that women in the 19th century are oppressed by the men and were expected to be obedient to their husband. Gilman shows the male perception throughout the conversations because the narrator explains that whatever she says, John shrugs away her sickness of being too nervous.
The unnamed narrator of the story is advised to abstain from any and all physical activity and intellectual stimulation. May it be reading, writing, or even to seeing her new baby. To ensure the narrator receives the full effect of this form of treatment, the woman’s husband takes her to a country house where she is kept in a former nursery decorated with yellow wallpaper. Over time she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper in every aspect whether it be the look or even smell of it. She eventually becomes so absorbed by the wallpaper that she sees a woman trapped inside of it and then tries to free her by peeling off the wallpaper.
The Significance of Voice in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s dynamic voice exemplifies the her struggle with insanity as she becomes infatuated with the wallpaper in the attic room where she holds herself prisoner. With instruction of her physician and approval from her husband, the narrator is to only rest while staying in the summerhouse recovering from “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 2). As the story plays out, the narrator begins to lose touch with reality and we witness her collapse from beginning to end through her own storytelling. From the start, the narrator confesses to not liking the attic room where she is staying at all and immediately explains that the “windows are barred”, “there are rings and things in the walls”, and that the wallpaper is “stripped off in great patches all around the head of my bead” (Gilman 4). At this point, the narrator appears normal and healthy, as anyone would be aware and curious of his or her surroundings in a new environment.
When they arrive, she feels that there is something “queer” about the estate. She even goes further to say that the house is haunted and wonders why it was unoccupied for so long. Her husband, John, thinks that the summer home will do her some good, because she is suffering from temporary nervous depression. John honestly does not think that anything is wrong with her and has convinced others of the same. The wife is forbidden to write or leave the house, and is confined to her bedroom most of the day.
The Yellow Wallpaper In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells the story of a woman who is forced, by her husband, to remain in one room until she fully recovers from her sickness. It doesn’t take long for the woman to begin to feel like a caged bird, trapped in the room with yellow wallpaper, before she starts looking for salvation. During her stay at the estate, she has many odd restrictions on what she can and cannot do. For example, her husband forbids her to keep a journal and also hinders her from leaving the room. The woman claims that she is is in summer home; however, evidence shows that not only is she not where she thinks she is, but also she is, in fact, a patient within the walls of a mental hospital or a similar institute.
Because of the fewer scenes and events used in short story, they have to be selected and ordered, lead swiftly to the moment of crisis face by the main character. Each scene reflected the conflict progressing between the women and her husband in order to compare the social class of both in society or at home. From the beginning, she was totally under the control from her husband who is a “high standing physician”, neither in treatment nor working outside. She felt can “not get well faster” and deep depression on herself. She gradually lost her sanity and became extremely madness at last, the story reached its climax and the women tear the wallpaper off the wall and felt freedom due to “pulled of most of the paper and can’t put her back”.