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The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper
A.P English
Summer Assignment
The Yellow Wallpaper More often then not we find ourselves holding back our true feelings, like the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator has a vast imagination but struggles with depression. Her husband John’s solution as her doctor is to forbid her from expressing her-self, leading her to insanity. A mind that is kept in a state of forced inactivity is doomed to self-destruction. Everyone needs a way to vent what is heavy in their thoughts. The narrator is so confined from using her mind, “But I must say what I feel and think in some way…it’s such a relief!”(Gilman 8). When she gets the chance to write in her secret journal she feels that her mind is being relieved from imprisonment. Already dealing with mental illness the narrator is told to keep her feelings bottled up. Although John believes that his solution is working, he slowly pushes his wife into a more unstable state. The mind is more powerful then what the eye can see. John doesn’t allow her to clear her head, “…he hates to have me write a word,” (Gilman 4). John restricts his wife from writing and releasing her feelings. This is allowing her imagination to overtake her mind and control her actions. Her mind has been cooped up for so long it’s in charge, her writings are just helping her obsess over the wallpaper even more, forcing her to completely lose her mind. Without a free flowing mind one is damned to senselessness. We see that the narrator was hampered into not voicing her opinion which led her to severe madness. The importance of self-expression is highlighted throughout the
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