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The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wall-Paper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper describes a mentally ill woman who goes insane from being prescribed by her husband to be locked in a room with little communication with others until her illness subsides.
I believe that Charlotte Perkins Gilman cast the Narrator’s husband and brother as physicians because they can diagnose her with symptoms of hysterical tendencies even though they are unable to help her. Also to show men could override women during this time. Without her husband and brother being portrayed as physicians they would not have been able to keep her incarcerated or might have let her persuade them to let her become social again and let her out of the room. If the characters followed Gilman’s advice she most likely would not have been observant to the yellow wall paper in the room and a woman that was trapped in it. This story might not exist because she would not have gone as crazy as to see people in the wallpaper. This story seems to be written by a mentally unhinged person because she seems to be paranoid by her husband John coming home and finding her writing in her journal or peeling the wallpaper off. Gilman is the only one in the short story that sees a non-existent woman in the wallpaper who is trapped just as she is feeling herself due to her diagnose of her illness. Her description of the wallpaper is a means for her to interpret the text in the wallpaper like the reader would be interpreting the text of the story. These two activities differ by actually reading the text of the short story and believing that there is a message on the wallpaper. According to http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_G.html, gothic literature has a supernatural being, and also states that the female character is vulnerable to male figures. This is apparent when the author declares that she is not allowed to do anything without direction from her husband. Jennie, Johns sister is a nurse/house keeper that makes Gilman

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