The room she stays in has yellow wallpaper that will later contribute to her psychological downfall along with the oppression felt from her environment. In both pieces of literature, the authors use a technique of gradually progressing the characters deterioration of their mental capacity. Through dramatic irony and other literary devices, the reader is permitted to see the depth of the characters illness. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, stays in a bedroom that was an old nursery which has an unattractive yellow wallpaper on the walls. To the narrator, the wallpaper is a nuisance and the pattern makes no sense to her.
“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.
She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. Over time, as her insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. The wallpaper's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced sickness, with discriminated-against minorities of the time (especially the Chinese), and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight. By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one.
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.
Most analyses of this piece have been from prominent feminists, who targeted the patriarchal structure of the society in the 19th century as the major cause of insanity of the narrator. Some of the most extreme feminist critics have even stepped further to claim that the narrator is initially not ill at all, hinting that the societal bonds of marriage imprisoned and twisted the mind of the poor narrator. Though this claim has not yet been verified, there are indeed several conspicuous signs that showcased societal imprisonment of women in The Yellow Wallpaper. For example, John’s overconfidence of his own medical knowledge led to his misjudgment of the narrator’s condition; whereas societal norms seem to force the narrator to believe in that misjudgment: “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? (1.10)” And under these torturing social rules,[change] the narrator, as a women and a wife, has no control over the pettiest details of her life, and she can do nothing for herself except from asking help from men, who dictates her life: “My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing” (1.11) And it is obvious that the chauvinistic ideas during
‘My father must have woken from his bewitchment’ implying that there are some lines that cannot be crossed. Gender roles also falls into her parent’s life, it was uncommon for a woman to take charge of her household instead of her husband another social value questioned. Julie’s actions can be compared to the naturalist tenet that humans have no free will or very little of it due to the environment and heredity that determine the choices that they make. Her mother didn’t conform to society and its norms and neither does Julie clearly shown by her indiscretion with Jean. So it’s almost as if here recklessness was passed down to her from her
The Invisible Cage Pride and Prejudice In the nineteenth century society, the options of choosing husbands for unmarried women are limited due to the reason that the society has prescribed a set of values for them. The English society associated the entrance of a woman into the public with a reprehensible loss of femininity. Jane Austen, the author of the novel Pride and Prejudice herself suffers in this era by not allowed to be acknowledged as the author for her books. In Jane Austen's book Pride and Prejudice, she depicts how young men and women behave in the society and how they set up their life and social position for their own desires. With this background, Jane tries to deliver the message that the people were restrained and they suffered by the rules set by the society such as family reputation, women’s position, and class division.
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.
Her father had said, “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such.” (364) Her father never allowed her to make her own decisions even when she was almost 30 years old. Many people think that maybe the reason why he was so strict with Miss Emily and why he put so much pressure on her could have traced back to her family. Emily’s family was a very noble family and her father had thought that they were the most prominent in the entire town and that no one else was fit for Miss Emily. Any time a man would come close to being a part of Emily’s life, her father would not allow it and he would chase them all off. Her father had kept her away from any experience with love that she might ever have known.
Though Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre is meant to be a feminist novel which challenges the status of women during the Victorian Age, Bronte puts women in a degraded position, through the portrayal of Jane and her relationships with John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers. At a young age, Jane’s parents died and left her in the care of her Uncle Reed, the brother of Jane’s mother. Jane’s mother was hated by almost everyone of her family, other than her dear brother, because of her marriage to a poor man by the name of Eyre. As the only one who cared for her mother, Uncle Reed adopted Jane Eyre and gave her the best care possible until he died. Afterwards, Jane received only the worst, most pernicious treatment possible from Mrs. Reed, her daughters Georgiana and Eliza, and her son, John.