The workers speak of her, basically, as Curley’s problem that needs to stay at home away from the other workers. She opens herself up to Crooks and Lennie because they possess equal amounts of powerlessness as she does. Curley’s wife feeds off of character’s insecurities, so she can strengthen herself against harm. At the end Curley’s wife’s powerlessness shows greatly when she is strangled at the hands of Lennie who she tries to seduce. This just shows how women then were little to any powerful.
The ugliness of the yellow wallpaper can be compared to the ugliness of her life at the time of the story, the way her husband doubts her illness and her not being able to break free from his grip. The nursery symbolizes how women were seen on the same level as children. A woman’s role during this time was one of confinement and the barred windows are symbols of this. The narrator tearing down the yellow wallpaper to find the woman represents her attempt to regain her sanity. The wallpaper is her confinement and by tearing it down she frees herself.
A main example from the book is that Melinda kept this huge secret held inside. She was too fearful to share it with anyone so instead she decided to keep it her secret. This turned out to be extremely detremental to her well being. It caused her grades to drop, she became an intravert, not wanting to speak to anyone or function properly as a teenager, she isolated herself from others and had no motivation to do anything. Melinda turned from being a loving young lady who had a close relationship with her parents to a recluse who became distant to her parents, friends and everyone.
Punishment in The Scarlet Letter In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, physical punsihment is nothing compared to how the mind can cause punishment. In the Scarlet Letter, Hester Phynne is isolated by the members of Purtian society and left with her child Pearl, a constent reminder of her sin. Dimmesdale’s choice to not feese up to his sin leaves him with mental punishment that makes him sicker and weaker. Chillingsworth does not receive pain, but he does inflict pain to those around him. The main characters of The Scarlet Letter are left to tourment by themselves, the worst punishment of them all.
After first being separated from Psyche then becoming bitter from not seeing the same things as Psyche once reunited, I realized the tragedy was that not only did Orual never found the “love of the Gods,” she also never learned to love her life and accept herself as the person she was. While she is described by her subjects as "the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful" of all rulers, Orual feels that her actions are only a mask of her inner ugliness. She despairs of ever overcoming her hideousness inside. She says, "I would set out boldly each morning to be just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts, but before
She isn’t aloud to do any kind of work and is given strict instructions to get air and relax her self. She spends most of her time in a room that she suspects to be an old play room for the past owner’s children. The room is covered with yellow wallpaper which taunts her with images and patterns that she sees. She is mesmerized by the images and they consume her. She loses her touch with reality and becomes one of the creeping women she sees.
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. After staring at the wallpaper for hours, she starts to notice a sub-pattern that is visible in a certain light. As she says, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast …they get through, and then the pattern strangles them off.” What she sees in this sub-pattern is 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 sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. The wallpaper represents the structure of family, medicine, and tradition in which she finds herself trapped.
Her disabilities have caused her to become withdrawn from the general population and keep to herself. The way she escaped from the pain was by caring for her glass menagerie. She found comfort in caring for these glass figures because she could easily relate to them. Over time, her disability had turned her into a very fragile being, just like her menagerie. Both were very beautiful, yet vulnerable to the outside world.
She is tired of fight with the world and is afraid of what is happening to her at this point in her life. So, as an escape from the reality of the world she closes her eyes. Sylvia is saying that just simply closing her eyes or hiding does not last forever because when she opens her eyes everything is still the same. "(I think I made you up inside my head)"?, with this, Sylvia is referring to the happiness and normality of her own life. She feels that this has never been a real part of her life and therefore she has only made it up in her head.
In the beginning, you immediately feel the isolation of the room in which our character lives, but you quickly figure she is there for a reason. In her writing in secret and disagreeing with physicians at all cost, you feel sorry for her, but also question if she is of right mind. There are times you are angry with the husband, but you know that is how it was at that time with how he treats her. I would agree most people reading would assume she is crazy and then see the clues that lead to postpartum depression and see the husband as not all bad. You cannot trust that her view of any reality when she seems most lucid is even clear enough for anything when you realize her state of mind.