Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her son, “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of the narrator’s struggle with this despair through her journal. Taking place in the 19th century, the narrator is much undermined by males in this time period. With her husband john being in charge of her health, she is unable to speak for herself which frustrates her and leads to further troubles. While living in a beautiful summer house the narrator’s husband, John, who is a physician, confines her to a large airy bedroom which he believes will cure her “temporary sickness”. With no one to talk to and forbidden to engage in any activities (including writing in her journal) she is drawn to the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a piece named “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the narrator of the story is vividly entangled in her imagination causing her artistic impulses to consume her emotions. She is a “closet psychotic” as she does not disclose this infatuation of the yellow wallpaper to anyone around her. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes a complex story where the narrator is trapped in her secret obsession of unraveling what’s inside this “yellow wallpaper”, which then drives her imaginative creativity, into insanity. The narrator begins by informing the reader how she and her family have recently started to stay in a new house for a little while so she may receive complete rest. This respite was prescribed to her by her husband, a physician.
The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates a gradual descent of the female narrator into a state of madness. Thanks to the story’s first person perspective, we are able to see how her mind functions and slowly degrades into insanity. With this point of view, however, we are left to question whether her account is accurate and factual. Should we openly trust what we are told by someone who has clearly gone mad? Her concept of reality is clearly neither sharp nor concrete, thus leaving us to wonder what to believe.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman has three themes: becoming free, madness, and the dangers of the “rest cure.” The story is written as the secret diary of a woman who is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression by her husband and doctor and is prescribed the “rest cure.” Though the narrator wants to write, she is prohibited from any activity due to her treatment. Thus, allowing her to create a figure in the yellow wallpaper while in the confinement of her room. Gilman writes in "The Yellow Wallpaper" of the narrator who is apparently trying to free herself from her sickness and the room, and she is trying to free the woman in the wallpaper. Throughout the story, the narrator, also known as the protagonist of the story, is trying to free herself from her illness. Readers can see this when Gilman writes, "I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press
The story goes by and the setting does not change, that is why the woman goes crazier and starts crawling into the wallpaper trying to help get the woman out. It is not to late before she realizes that she is insane and the woman she tries to get out of the wallpaper is only herself. There is also some kind of irony in the story because her husband puts her into that room without activity or work to help her problem. But the irony is that instead of helping her, it just makes the woman more insane because she imagines more things. The setting impacted the character in the story because the woman was in that lonely room the whole time and the woman just felt more insane.
Your Name Name of Class Professors Name Date The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was first published in 1899 and is the journal of Jane who is quite ill with what is regarded as “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman, 1899). She is taken away on holiday by her husband, and kept in a room where she is meant to be healing. However, she finds herself distracted by the wallpaper in the room, and begins a downward spiral into complete psychosis as her perception of and relationship with the wallpaper evolves. The relationship with the yellow wallpaper is not the only thing that changes, as she soon begins to see distinct changes in her husband, her sister-in-law, and herself. She is compelled to unlock the secret of the wallpaper, at any
The Yellow Wallpaper The final lines for “The Yellow Wallpaper” make me believe that the narrator has finally slipped into insanity. I think Jane is actually the narrator, and when she slips into insanity she feels that she has finally escaped from the torments of her own mind. The longer the narrator stays in the bedroom with the yellow wallpaper, the more she feels she is in prison, and the woman she sees imprisoned behind the wallpaper symbolizes her and how she feels. The narrator becomes desperate to free the woman behind the wallpaper before their rental is up, because she thinks that freeing the woman in the wallpaper will be freeing herself from her prison. At the end, the narrator briefly considers committing suicide with the rope
The Yellow Wallpaper By the end of the “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator lets her surroundings, the wallpaper, and her husband John, get the best of her. John treats the narrator as if she were a child and takes away her right to choose and decide how she feels; this eventually leads to her defeat. After being treated like a child and put in a room that is barred up, she develops problems which eventually lead to paranoia and insanity. Both paranoia and insanity eventually lead her to believe that she is the woman who has escaped from the yellow wallpaper. From the very beginning of the story, problems are brought up that hint toward the defeat of Jane.
She is ill and her husband thinks this is the way to get her better, just not do anything and be away for people for a while. However the woman starts to go a little crazy when she starts to become obsessed with her wallpaper in her bed room. She thinks there are people in it and ends up feeling like the woman in the wallpaper, so insane. The two stories very different but then again very a
The spots of the wallpaper that have been torn off represent the women that have come before her that have had the same desires to escape from the sphere of domesticity in which women are bound. As the figure within the wallpaper begins to become apparent to the narrator, she cannot determine whether it is one woman or multiple women that are stuck behind the wallpaper. Describing the multiple heads she believes she is seeing, the narrator says, “They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white” (99). These heads were