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Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A mental illness affects every aspect of someone’s life. Therefore, it is important to get proper help. A woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was trapped with her mental illness, while two physicians did not recognize her suffering as a serious case. The author focused on proving treatment to be an essential part of recovery. The author portrayed a mental illness as something that was invisible to other people. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman received improper treatment for her mental illness and focused on the house to help her escape, as a result, she was unable to recover from the woman in the wallpaper. The woman’s husband, John, did not use proper treatment for her case because he was blind to his wife’s illness. …show more content…
As the story came closer to an end, the narrator observed that the wallpaper began to “stain everything it touched” and left “yellow smooches on all my clothes and John’s.” Her mental illness was no longer staying in one room of the house, which also represents how the poor treatment beginning to affect each person around her. She described the woman in the wallpaper as “stooping down and creeping behind the pattern,” which means that the woman was only watching her. A mental illness stays in the back of someone’s mind as people are around but appears when the person is alone. The paper was meticulously examined by the wife, and she found out that “she takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.” This symbolizes the mental illness trying to escape from only being visible to the wife. Paula A. Treichler described the ending as “madness is seen as a kind of transcendent sanity.” This furthers the notion that she used her mental illness to escape from people who did not help her. In the end, the wife is revealed to have the name Jane, which was told by the woman in the wallpaper. She escaped and took over the body of Jane when she maliciously shouted, “And I have pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” At this time, Jane was no longer writing in her journal because it was clear that the mental illness had won. Jane began mimicking the motions of the woman by creeping around the room while her husband could no longer save

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