Zoey Crain Comp 1302 Prof. Dodge February 9, 2012 The Yellow Wallpaper The psychological thriller, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story about a woman with postpartum depression. The narrator’s husband and brother concluded it was a nervous depression. Her husband and she move out to a rather suspicious house, so she can better herself. She isn’t aloud to do any kind of work and is given strict instructions to get air and relax her self.
However their union seems less like a marriage and more like the relationship one would see between parent and child. Like a parent, John is very controlling and patronizing in contrast with our main character, who is submissive and compliant like a child. Furthermore, John, although he is caring and loving, really doesn’t take his wife seriously. In this time period PPD was not discovered. So we see our main character and we feel her pain, we know she is suffering because she can feel within herself that something is not right.
Most likely Jane is kept it the room for the reason that she is sick and needs a rest cure treatment. When more questions are asked about Jane’s sickness then the readers can conclude what is really going on. The reader knows that Jane is a patient and the house is specially made. Now a new question comes up; “Is Jane crazy?” The reader finds information in the story that Jane is highly imaginative, seeing things, creeps around the room, addicted to wallpaper, repeats the same words over and over, talks is “gentle” voice, cries at nothing and not sleeping at night. What the reader can draw from the story is that the woman is mentally ill and is currently being treated for her illness in the mental institution.
The narrator tells us in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “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?” (Gilman 66). She suffers from a nervous disorder that her husband does not think is significant problem. In line 12 of the story, the narrator says “So I… am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again” (Gilman 66). From the way she describes it, her disorder affects her more than her husband realizes or gives her credit for. In “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard has a “heart trouble” that apparently needs to be watched to some extent because Chopin wrote, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death” (Chopin 516).
Mary Davis Dr. Blair Eng. 1102 February 7, 2013 Opposites Attract Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper”, it is clear that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wants her reader to do something the narrator's husband did not do; that is, to understand. As the story begins we see that the narrator is an imaginative and very expressive woman. The only obvious affliction she has, is that John has no idea as to what her actual needs are as a patient. The narrator is forced to suppress her opinions concerning her condition.
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.
By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is the first stage in a feminist uprising. From the beginning of the story, the narrator’s creativity is set in conflict with John’s rationality. As a writer, the narrator thrives in her use of her imagination, and her creativity is an inherent part of her nature. John does not recognize his wife’s fundamental creativity and believes that he can force out her imaginative fancies and replace them with his own solid
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.
It states “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious… I am glad my case is not serious”. Throughout the story she refers to him as dear. When it mentions “John laughs at me… but one expects that from a marriage,” that shows that John can also be the narrator’s husband. At the end of the story, when the narrator is has her mental breakdown, John ends up fainting after seeing how far gone the narrator has gone. This also makes it seem like John is the narrator’s husband because he is so
The wallpaper is used characterically to reflect the marriage the narrator finds herself ambushed inside. At the start of the short story, the wallpaper is merely seen as an aberrant bore, but as the narrative progresses, the wallpaper becomes much more baleful and frightening. As a site of symbolism, the symbol has three functions in Charlotte Perkins Gilman s ’, “The Yellow Wallpaper”: it reveals the wallpaper including the imagery, imprisonment and symbolism. The imagery of the wallpaper in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” transitions as the short story is developed in order to emulate the increasing realization of the monopoly the narrator’s marriage has upon herself. The very first descriptions illustrate her initial animus by describing it as “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Perkins 41-42).