The yellow wallpaper In the story, wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, is a symbol of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere. Over the course of the story, the wallpaper becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning. She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” essay The major concerns that can be explored in “The Diary of Anne Frank” are: lack of privacy, restricted freedom and suffer of adaption. Additionally, “The Diary of Anne Frank” demonstrates the difficulties of growing up, made harder in circumstances of war. Ultimately, despite of all the challenges Anne faced she lived in hope which gave her strength to get over her fear and loss of freedom during the Nazi invasion. Essentially, the lack of privacy, limitation of freedom and the theme of adaption are considered as the main issues found in “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “Quack, quack, quack says the Mistress Chatterback” is a directed statement to Peter. This can be explained by the use of repetition of “Quack, quack, quack” that Peter is as irritating as a duck.
Gilman uses symbols to explain the how women are trapped in domestic life. The symbol that Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper in the room she is confined in. At first, the wallpaper is just awful as she says “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow.” She is disgusted by it and understands why children, who have been in this room, would want to tear it down. Then, the wallpaper becomes a point of curiosity as she wants to discover the organization of the pattern. She said, “...and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion,” as if the wallpaper was made with symmetry in mind.
Stephanie Bahniuk Feb. 16/2011 Tearing Away The Metaphors: An Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of depression and madness intricately weaves subtle symbols and hidden details throughout a women’s personal story of frustration within herself and from external forces. Through the main character’s fascination with peculiar yellow wallpaper, her husband’s childish affection and forceful care, and the effects of the house and environment around her, an overwhelming sense of oppression and insanity is portrayed. The presentation of each of these elements allows the reader to interpret the text personally and connect to the struggle. The Yellow Wallpaper makes a prominent statement towards a women’s rights and personal freedoms as well as showing the progression of delirium through various harsh influences. The narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper that surrounds her bedroom begins merely as intrigue and climaxes to a point where reality and what she imagines within the wallpaper becomes blurred.
In Sophocles’ and Anouilh’s versions of Antigone, the playwrights have very strict guidelines when portraying their female characters. This portrayal is supported through the reversal of gender roles, as well as stereotypical appearances of women. Through the breaking of gender stereotypes and the failure to abide by gender law, the characters in both versions of Antigone succumb to the temptation of suicide. By examining the characters in each play, it is clear that those who follow gender laws and have pleasing appearances are given choice over their fate, and those that do not must die, their death allowing them to achieve the concept of true beauty. Those that break assigned gender laws will have no choice but to submit to an inevitable death.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening characters, who throughout the play constantly battles between her desperation for masculinity, and also with her natural instincts of femininity. She continually suppresses her instincts towards compassion, motherhood and fragility, the factors of femininity in which she loathes, and instead she turns her ambitions in favour of ruthlessness, and the single-minded pursuit of power. Throughout the play, Lady Macbeth refers to motherhood, and menstruation several times, ‘make thick my blood, stop up th’access and passage to remorse…’ begging spirits to get rid of her menstruation and so block up her blood flow, and so she hopes all empathy and sense of caring will be abolished in order to carry out the dreadful deeds she and Macbeth will partake in. She is desperate to show no weakness, and goes as far as to beg to evil spirits to take from her all natural womanly instincts. She is frightened that she will not be able to carry out the murder if her husband so fails.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is driven by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage.
Tsitsi Dangaremba's Nervous Conditions is used to portray the impact of these power hierarchies, and how it all comes down to the root of ‘Englishness’. The female characters are used in order to reveal how resistance to oppression works, even though the outcomes are successful to different degrees. Nervous Conditions demonstrates how the traditional, colonised women suffer the most. Dangaremba shows in the novel that regardless of the class and social status differentiating the women, oppression through colonialism and patriarchy exists in all forms: “The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate,” (Dangaremba 12). Tambu, the protagonist of the novel, right from the beginning explicitly reveals the hardship which the women endure.
The main character herself is a girl who is being trapped by tradition, the patriarchy and what is expected of her, yet everything about her character screams freedom and unruliness. At the start of the scene Merida’s mother, Eleanor, has been bounded by her Father and his men to be slain for revenge and I see that this moment has a undercurrent of hidden subtext towards women’s issues and the patriarchy. Eleanor in her human form is a woman of containment. Her hair always neatly held back with many strands of lace and her soft form always tightly contained, causing each movement she makes to be deliberate and calm but also feel stifled, hinting at that maybe once she was a young woman a lot like Merida. We know that the life of the queen was not one that Eleanor chose on her own, earlier in the film she explains her trepidation when she was meant to be betrothed and this all hints to Eleanor being ‘bound’ by what society (her new kingdom) expected from her, and again she is bound whilst being the most physically strong she has ever been by the men in her society too blind from their hate to realise she is the
Catherine Earnshaw: True love vs. social craving The purpose of this essay is to portray Catherine’s duality from the point of view of her relationship with Heathcliff and marriage with Edgar Linton. To begin with, we can define Catherine Earnshaw a character at constant war with herself. Her very conflicting nature is the underlying cause of all her troubles and has deep roots in her own personality, nothing but a mixture of traits borrowed from, both, Heathcliff and Edgar, her partners. She has a touch of a passionate brute with some of a spoiled nobleman. The battle of dominance within Catherine is responsible for her capricious nature and this feature can be observed from the first chapters.