In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the reader is presented with the many different emotions and perspectives of the narrator as she sees images of a woman in the wallpaper. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, successfully makes this event interesting and significant. Some may see the lady behind the wallpaper as something the narrator sees because she is “crazy” or imagines for no other reason than boredom. However, only one thing must be true as various parts in the story allude and point to. The narrator is the woman trapped in the wallpaper, and the narrator reflects on her feelings of imprisonment within reality and her own mind.…
The “The Yellow Wallpaper” story started off with a small family that moved into a new summer home to spend some time away. The narrator’s husband is her own physician, and he tells her that she needs rest away from people to recover from her mental illness. The main character’s favorite hobby is to write thoughts and ideas down on paper. She is also a mother, but she doesn’t mention her child that often due to the fact that she wasn’t able to take care of her baby. The narrator is a young woman, sometimes referred to as “Jane” who is suffering from severe mental illness; not being able to have freedom caused the narrator's health to fall into a worse pattern.…
The further she focuses on it, the more obsessed she becomes. She begins to observe how it varies in different light and notices a sub pattern within the wallpaper. This she perceives as a positive side to the wallpaper. All of this stimulates her mind and she even becomes excited about life because of the wallpaper. As she continues to study the wallpaper, she notices that the woman in the wallpaper is behind bars and shakes the bars powerfully. Since she only focuses that wallpaper, she begins to put herself in the place of that woman she claims to observe. Had she been taken away from that house or given other activities, she would not have continued with the delusion that she is in the…
Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in 1892 after Gilman suffered from “a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” (Gilman, “Why I wrote”) and was placed under the care of Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell’s cure for women with Gilman’s affliction were told to “live as domestic life as far as possible, have but two hours’ intellectual life a day and to never touch a pen, brush, or pencil again” (Gilman, “Why I wrote”). While following Mitchell’s advice, Gilman’s condition slowly worsened and only after she returned to working did her health improve. Using the knowledge she gained from the experience, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The short story features a woman by the name of Jane, who is…
The "Yellow Wallpaper," is a personal account of the author's, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, struggle with depression. It vividly documents one woman's experience with depression and the toil she endured through the treatment of the "Rest Cure." The story helps readers to get a mental picture of how society and solitary confinement can both drive a person into sheer madness.…
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1899 is a story that depicts physical, and mental illness as well as the factors surrounding seclusion and what it can do to a person. Some of the changes that were occurring in the story such of that as the changes in the wallpaper, reflect the changes that were occurring in her at the time. The description and attitude change to be drawn with the thinking of the narrator. A balance of positive and negative imagery also plays a role in the story. There is a progression of change throughout the story and during this time the narrator is unable to give an accurate description because of her mental state.…
The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, concentrates on the narrator’s deep depression and her struggle to get better. The narrator spends her summer vacation confined in a nursery on the top floor of a mansion. This is in an attempt to cure her illness by her husband John, who is a doctor. The room has barred windows on all sides and yellow wallpaper with “sprawling flamboyant patterns” (514). The narrator at first is in disgust with the wallpaper and thinks it is an artistic sin. Then with nothing to do, and her imagination running free, she turns her imagination onto the wallpaper. She uses the wallpaper as a form of entertainment and tries to figure out the pattern. The central symbol of the short story is the wallpaper. The meaning behind the wallpaper represents the narrator’s entrapment and her struggle with depression. This essay will describe her descent into a maddening depression in a chronological manner.…
Much of this story is centered on eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpaper and the woman's obsessive interactions with it. It is important, though, to understand that although the plot is primarily based around her neurosis, the objective of the story is to deliver a completely unrelated message. Many critics of "The Yellow Wallpaper" claim that the story might drive someone mad simply by reading it, but this, in my opinion, is beside the point. Gilman seeks instead to evoke a message of individual expression and successfully does so by recording the progression of the illness, through the state of the wallpaper.…
Constantly alone and forbidden to leave her bedroom, the lack of something to occupy her time causes the protagonist to become delusional. With “barred windows for little children and rings and things in the walls” the room is much like her prison (Gilman 174). Even the pattern on the wallpaper (which at first was completely random) “at night in any kind of light, twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all moonlight, becomes bars” as if she is caged (Gilman 182). Both times here she refers to aspects of her room as bars. As she begins to feel imprisoned she projects her feelings onto the wallpaper, but the idea of the room being her prison goes from figurative to more literal as the isolation deepens her need for an escape.…
The most obvious conflict the narrator has to deal with is living in the room with the yellow wallpaper and differentiating creativity from reality. The narrator becomes fond of the wallpaper and feels an excessive need to figure out the pattern. She says, “I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I have ever heard of” (Gilman 224). Her days become preoccupied with the wallpaper and she feels a distinct connection to it. While she tries to decode the wallpaper’s pattern, her creativity allows her to see a face in the wallpaper. She says, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (Gilman 223). As she continues to study the wallpaper, she comes to believe that she sees a woman creeping in the chaotic wallpaper who is trapped behind it: “The front pattern does- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 227). She begins to have a bond with this woman and can relate to her. The woman in the wallpaper is essentially the narrator. They are similar in the sense that they are both trapped and unable to escape. Towards the end of the story, the narrator reaches a state of insanity where she can no longer differentiate herself from the figure she sees in the wallpaper. She tells us, “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is…
At first the narrator sees the wallpaper as just an unpleasant decoration with a horrid pattern. However, as the story goes on she starts to see what appears to be a sub-pattern behind the main pattern. This later comes to view as a woman who seems to be trying to escape the…
The main character in Charlotte P.Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, narrates her own life and describes her struggle with depression which by the end of the story evolved into insanity. Narrator’s husband, John, treats her like a small child, forbids her to express herself, and keeps her bound to restricted room. Due to her husbands actions she becomes physically, emotionally and socially isolated, which ultimately made her insane.…
In the “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Gilman writes about a woman who sees herself in a haunting wallpaper and she wants to be free, and the struggle between her and John. John treats her like she is his child instead of his wife. By any man treating their wife like John does will drive her insane. That is exactly what John did, drove his wife crazy enough to make her want to stay in her room, lay in the bed, and stare at the wallpaper. Her husband does not treat her right, talks to her like a child, and makes her stay in her room all alone.…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes us through the journey of a woman that is depressed, after having her baby, in the short story named ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Despite the numerous attempts to get help, her husband and brother who are both physicians, continue to inform her that it is ‘all in her head’ and that she is not actually depressed. They both think that she is fine. They believe that she is just letting her surroundings determine the outcome, instead of determining her own outcome, despite the circumstances around her. She continues to try to prove that she is mentally struggling and needs more than a prescription continuously shoved in her face.…
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. … I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once. And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.”(Gilman, 1899).The woman tried to free the woman behind the wallpaper, which the narrator freeing herself and is trying to gain her own identity from her husband. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the lady only gained mental control over her life when she freed the lady trapped behind the wallpaper. The lady trapped behind the wallpaper, represented the woman feeling trapped in a marriage and wanting to be free. By the women escaping, she ends up losing her identity still because she ends up mentally destroyed. “I’ve got out at last…in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman, 1899).Gilman used setting in, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, to give the readers a visual of how the character ends up trying to find herself, but still losing herself in the…