In The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Gilman, the symbol of the yellow wallpaper itself portrays a role into the main characters spiral into madness. To the main character, Jane, the wallpaper is at first a nuisance, then an obsession, and finally salvation. Jane becomes overwhelmed from the confided space with the wallpaper and begins to spiral into a deeper depression than what she started with and eventually loses her mind. The material of the paper itself represents Jane's everyday life, the illogical pattern that comes about in it, reflects the absence of logic in her mind and the very colour of the paper depicts the illness that yellows her sight and imprisons her within an unpredictable life, these things all playing a role in Jane's insanity. The wallpaper is at first a great annoyance to Jane as she claims that it is confusing and contradicting.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a story that tells the unspoken truths of women in a time when such things as depression and mental illness were not to be spoken of. This story depicts how women with depression and mental illness were hidden from public view just as unwed mothers and people with disabilities were. Gilman uses the story to show how men viewed and responded to the emotional and mental health of women and how not listening to one’s own voice can be life threatening. The main focus of Charlotte Gilman’s story is how the emotional and mental health of women can be overlooked, ignored and the dangers that such behaviors cause. In 1899, women were looked at as delicate beings that only needed rest to cure what ailments afflicted them.
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.
Reflective Reading Response When I first read Shiloh, I had to go back and read the story again, which was frustrating because I had waited until the morning to read the story a second time. I am glad that I reread it though, because it completely changed my outlook on the story. At first, I looked at it from a shallow-minded perspective. All I looked at was the main ideas and blew off the rest of the material. When I read it for the second time, I found an appreciation for the literature we were reading.
Wallpaper Symbolizing Jane’s Insanity In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, the wallpaper causes and symbolizes Jane’s imprisonment which eventually causes her decent into insanity. Gilman shows this through the patterns and colors in the wallpaper itself, through the woman that she believes is stuck in the wallpaper, and when then wallpaper is finally taken down. As Jane continues to study the wallpaper, the different aspects that she discovers contribute to her eventual madness. The physical appearance of the wallpaper is directly symbolic of Jane’s situation. The yellowish color is affiliated with the weakness, and the powerlessness that she is feeling.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” using the unreliable narrator which makes the story more engaging. Gilman’s famous short story had a lot to do with her own personal life and how she suffered from postpartum depression. The setting and theme of Gilman’s story were unbelievable and makes the short story more exhilarating. The narrator in the short story was unreliable. Gilman told the story from her own point of view; the reader cannot trust what to believe.
Today’s society Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. After suffering from depression throughout most of her life, she went to seek advice, and was told to stop doing anything, that she normally did, because it would make her conditions worse. She therefore wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to express herself, and express the suffering she went through. Even though the society of the time period she was from criticized it, she argued that she wasn’t intending to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy by reading The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman was so far ahead from her time period, so she was criticized for writing about the topic of depression and mental illness, which for that time period was very frowned upon and unspoken.
Carol Becker Sociological Criticism 2/11/13 Transformation of a Woman The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is all about the oppression of women, how to overcome it, and become an individual with a voice. This story takes us on the journey of a young, child-like woman diagnosed with a "temporary nervous depression" who is "absolutely forbidden to work." Of course when speaking of "work", it is not the typical idea we think of today. Women during that time were to be domestic types, take care of the husband and house. Be seen, but not heard.
Such isolated atmosphere and forced solitary confinement eventually envelops the narrator in her insanity. While receiving conflicting information from the narrator herself, the reader becomes aware of the narrator's decline in mental health. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s skewed perceptions of her surroundings and mental state, along with her inconsistent narration, reflects her incomprehension of the reality of her declining mental health leaving the audience left in a similar state of confusion. The narrator and her physician husband, John, rent a mansion for the summer so she may recuperate from what is described as a nervous condition. Although the narrator does not believe that she is actually ill, John is convinced that she is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression” (Gillman 12), and prescribes rest and isolation as her treatment.
To others, these actions are looked upon as insanity but in both situations, there are only two ways of escaping their realism; insanity or death. And in both cases these women chose” insanity”. I say “insanity” because to us, the readers, they may appear to be insane but for these women it was their only place of contentment. These women have nothing but the odds of the way society viewed women against them. They are in a period of time where women has very little say in what takes place in their household or even in their town.