Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.
Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.
August 21, 2013
ENG 101
In the summer of 1855 a mentally ill woman moves into a secluded estate with her husband. She immediately voices her concerns about the eerie feeling she gets in the house and how much she hates the yellow wallpaper, but like always, her husband disregards her concerns and insists that he knows best because he is a doctor. She also believes that she was born to be a writer, but her husband forbids her from writing or communicating with other people and insists that she stay in bed to rest. Much like a prisoner in solitary confinement, the narrator starts to lose her mind. She begins to fixate her entire life on the wallpaper while she spends her days in bed. She started keeping a journal which he hid from her family, and in it, she writes about how she ‘discovered’ a creeping woman trapped behind the pattern. She centers her life on freeing this woman by locking the door and attempting to tear off all of the wallpaper. When her husband comes home from work, he breaks down the door, sees the mess, and faints. Then the woman crawls out of the room and the story seems to be over, but there has got to be more. This woman is not simply your Martha Stewart of the 1800s that doesn’t like her bedroom wallpaper. The job of the reader is to break down the roles of each character, analyze the major symbols, evaluate the theme and use them like the pieces of a puzzle to understand what the author, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was trying to say. Stetson put a lot of thought into the characters that she chose for the story and the setting in which they were placed. In the 1800s, the role of the woman was to stay home to cook, clean and raise the kids while the husband worked. The men were the authoritative figures and the women did what they were told.. In this case, the narrator is both the patient and the wife, so her husband/doctor controls her life completely. The task of the reader in
August 21, 2013
ENG 101
In the summer of 1855 a mentally ill woman moves into a secluded estate with her husband. She immediately voices her concerns about the eerie feeling she gets in the house and how much she hates the yellow wallpaper, but like always, her husband disregards her concerns and insists that he knows best because he is a doctor. She also believes that she was born to be a writer, but her husband forbids her from writing or communicating with other people and insists that she stay in bed to rest. Much like a prisoner in solitary confinement, the narrator starts to lose her mind. She begins to fixate her entire life on the wallpaper while she spends her days in bed. She started keeping a journal which he hid from her family, and in it, she writes about how she ‘discovered’ a creeping woman trapped behind the pattern. She centers her life on freeing this woman by locking the door and attempting to tear off all of the wallpaper. When her husband comes home from work, he breaks down the door, sees the mess, and faints. Then the woman crawls out of the room and the story seems to be over, but there has got to be more. This woman is not simply your Martha Stewart of the 1800s that doesn’t like her bedroom wallpaper. The job of the reader is to break down the roles of each character, analyze the major symbols, evaluate the theme and use them like the pieces of a puzzle to understand what the author, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was trying to say. Stetson put a lot of thought into the characters that she chose for the story and the setting in which they were placed. In the 1800s, the role of the woman was to stay home to cook, clean and raise the kids while the husband worked. The men were the authoritative figures and the women did what they were told.. In this case, the narrator is both the patient and the wife, so her husband/doctor controls her life completely. The task of the reader in