Yellow Wallpaper
Essay 1: The Yellow Wallpaper: Choose one or more incidents in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and explain what is disclosed and what is concealed in the story between the characters. How does this technique affect the reader's interpretation of the events in the stories? Compare an event from your life that is similar in terms of having both disclosed and concealed information. What did you learn from this?
I, thankfully, have not ever been in the situation that Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about in The Yellow Wallpaper. I have only witnessed what being in a confining relationship can do through my dearest friend’s struggle in her marriage. On the outside you would think that everything is peachy keen, but the happy exterior is concealing a deep dark secret.
I cannot pick just one incident in the story to write about. I feel like every incident is very important to telling the whole story. You learn a lot about the narrator’s illness and marriage in her opening lines. She admits that her husband John, who is also her doctor, is very condescending. When they move into the rental house for the summer, he belittles her thoughts on the house and on her illness. While she feels she needs stimulation, he is adamant that she needs to lie still and have no stimulation at all.
In the journal she describes the wallpaper that is in the room that John picked out for her recovery. She uses very descriptive imagery to describe how “revolting” the color and pattern is. Inside of what she considers her prison the wallpaper becomes her distraction. She has varying emotions towards the wallpaper. She is at first scared of it and then it becomes more and more interesting to her. She eventually starts seeing a trapped woman inside of the pattern. By the end of the story she has started trying to free the woman in the paper and in essence herself as well.
The narrator talks about longing to write but John forbids her to do so. She longs to work and write but he has forbidden her
I, thankfully, have not ever been in the situation that Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about in The Yellow Wallpaper. I have only witnessed what being in a confining relationship can do through my dearest friend’s struggle in her marriage. On the outside you would think that everything is peachy keen, but the happy exterior is concealing a deep dark secret.
I cannot pick just one incident in the story to write about. I feel like every incident is very important to telling the whole story. You learn a lot about the narrator’s illness and marriage in her opening lines. She admits that her husband John, who is also her doctor, is very condescending. When they move into the rental house for the summer, he belittles her thoughts on the house and on her illness. While she feels she needs stimulation, he is adamant that she needs to lie still and have no stimulation at all.
In the journal she describes the wallpaper that is in the room that John picked out for her recovery. She uses very descriptive imagery to describe how “revolting” the color and pattern is. Inside of what she considers her prison the wallpaper becomes her distraction. She has varying emotions towards the wallpaper. She is at first scared of it and then it becomes more and more interesting to her. She eventually starts seeing a trapped woman inside of the pattern. By the end of the story she has started trying to free the woman in the paper and in essence herself as well.
The narrator talks about longing to write but John forbids her to do so. She longs to work and write but he has forbidden her