...How far does Stetson show the narrator is gaining freedom in her text? Stetson’s semi-autobiographical novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be largely argued weather Stetson’s narrator is gaining freedom, or is just being controlled further by the ‘mechanisms of patriarchy’. Despite the narrator trying to find ‘true equality’, Millett suggests ‘the attitude of [the] male character towards women [is] not so emancipated”. Stetson’s response towards freedom is very apparent to her, but it can be debated that a point exactly hasn’t been successful to her readers. The ‘position of women’ is ‘largely ignored’ in the novella, this can be shown by ‘the attitude’ revealed by the ‘male character’ John. The narrator states that “If a physician of high standing and one’s own husband assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression…[I] am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. Personally, disagree with their ideas”. The word “personally” depicts that she herself disagrees with her own treatment; however, she has no power over her situation. The ‘denigrating, exploitative and repressive’ (Miller, 1891-1980) voices of her husband, family and medical establishments urge her to be passive and go on with her treatment. The word “forbidden” suggests that John is quite a dominating figure, as he disobeys of any alternative activity, besides her acquired task. She is required to be convicted on everything she wants to...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, highlights the repressed position of most married women during the 19th century. The narrator struggles both at the hands of her family members and internally. Her husband John, a physician, makes an effort to alleviate his wife’s mental state by moving their family into an old style home located in a remote area and isolating her as much as possible. He determines that it is unhealthy for her to entertain, interact with their baby, even to write which she seems to enjoy a great deal. When approaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” one has to keep in mind the importance of the title itself. John decides on their bedroom in the new home and it is covered in yellow wallpaper that the narrator takes great issue with. Using reader response, it is evident that Gilman uses imagery and symbolism to merge the protagonist’s life with that of the “woman” behind the yellow wallpaper. Before an analysis is presented the reader must first understand the marital expectations and male to female dynamic during the time period to which Gilman is writing. Married women faced oppression at the hands of society as well as their husbands. The 1800’s were a time when the wife was to be seen and not heard. It was a general societal expectation that wives if financially secure could have no real issues of their own. This was also because they were not expected to think on their own. They were expected to only reflect the...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Birth-mark by Nathaniel Hawthorne have two characters with many similarities. The character in The Birthmark is not the main character in the story, but plays an important role is Georgiana. Georgiana is a beautiful women except for the hideous birthmark on her face hence the name of the story The Birthmark. The character in The Yellow Wallpaper is the narrator, whose name we were never given. These two women have such a similar story, but are both so different at the same time. Georgiana and the narrator, women with almost identical stories, were different by minor discrepancies that changed the enter course of their stories. The women in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Birth-mark have...
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...The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses on a woman who is struggling with post traumatic syndrome after recently having a baby. Her doctor, who is also her husband, gives her the diagnosis to stay in bed all day and eventually thinking she will get better. From lying in bed all day she starts studying the yellow wallpaper, thinking she sees something in it. By the end of the story, it has driven her crazy and realizes the woman she sees in the wallpaper is really her and breaks free. The setting where the story is takes place in the nineteenth century in a large, summer home. The narrator is primarily stuck in one of the bedrooms within the house with yellow wallpaper. The story never gives her a name, but that she is a young, upper-...
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...three short stories; “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King all have unreliable narrators. Although all of these narrators suffer from mental illnesses, the narrator from, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the most insane because she contributes to the most heinous acts. The narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” cannot witness reality because of hallucination. Others believe that the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” is more unreliable because he suffers from delusions and paranoia of an evil eye. While this statement is...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper: Narrator’s Perception Of Reality "The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you." (Gildman, p. 71) The story of the Yellow Wallpaper tells us about the madness of the “nameless” main character as she is suffering from a nervous depression. Her husband john, a physician, takes her to a leased summer home to try to relieve her with rest-cure. Rather than curing his wife from her disorder, John worsens the effects sending her into a severe depression. The role of the yellow wallpaper plays a dominant role in the story reviling her insanity through her writings, her husband’s treatments that worsen her health; and the lady behind the wallpaper. The narration in the Yellow Wallpaper is written in a unique first person point of view. Because of this we are able to see the deterioration of her state throughout the whole story. The narrator of the story is isolated from the outside world only exposed through a barred window to look out. She has no contact with the outside world, except john and their housekeeper Jennie, which leads her to writing. John does not want his wife to write because he thinks it will diminish her treatment, but she does anyway, which is exhausting for her to do it in secret. As the narrators...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conflict is the commotion that is created between characters or their ideas. It could also be the mental dilemma a character might face. In the Yellow Wallpaper, a short story written in the early 1890s in California was able to show a range of conflicts. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman who has given birth and is suffering from postpartum depression which was not discovered during that time. The short story is told in the first-person narrative from a woman’s perspective which shows conflict that is created between her and her husband, the society and the yellow wallpaper. The narrator’s mental deterioration is shown in the story clearly and this had created conflicts which the narrator had found her own way of resolving. The major conflict in the Yellow Wallpaper is the conflict between the narrator and her husband. Their conflict is mainly caused by the lack of trust that is inflicted upon their relationship “You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” This indicates that the writer’s husband whom is also her doctor doesn’t trust his wife and plays a major role in her ‘nervous breakdown’. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” The husband, John is a controlling husband that babies his wife and has isolated her from the outside world by putting her in a room because of her alleged illness. John is manipulative and authoritative...
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...Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Courtney Katich Baker College Bak beautifully discusses how isolation (aka “rest”) was used as treatment in the nineteenth-century for depression in women. Doctors used rest or isolation as treatment for “nervous prostration”(Bak, 1994). The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is put on a treatment plan by her husband/doctor that is of isolation. Bak asks a question about the narrator’s sanity; was she already mad in the start of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and just reliving the decline that has already taken place (Bak, 1994) or was the story about the narrator’s slow journey into madness? I believe that both questions are the answer to Bak’s question. Bak goes on to explain just this. Bak depicts Gilman’s description of the narrators isolated living conditions. Gilman’s description of the room leaves Bak to believe that the room would drive anyone into insanity. I know that I would surly go mad in such a place. Bak cites the feminist critic Elanie Hedges who says that the “paper symbolizes her situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself” (Bak, 1994). Bak explains how “The Yellow Wallpaper” became a feminist writing explaining that men were guilty of the storyteller's psychical imprisonment and thus the mental failure. Bak (1994) compares the room and house the narrator lives in during her depression to a dehumanizing dystopia like cage forced upon the narrator by her husband/doctor...
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...“The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about a young woman whose husband takes her to a country home for the summer in order for her to get some rest and fresh air to cure her of her nervousness, but she has an obsession with the wallpaper and ends up going completely mad. The narrator is a mother of an infant and wife of a physician, John, who decides that her nervous condition can be cured with plenty of rest, tonics, and sunshine and fresh air. She believes her condition would improve with “congenial work, with excitement and change” (Gilman 221). Being in the same room day after day, she begins to try and make sense of the pattern in and behind the wallpaper, seeing a creeping woman. The narrator’s fixation with the old yellow wallpaper drives her insane. Gilman implies that the discouragement of mental development can have negative effects on one’s psyche. The narrator is treated like a small child by her husband and is told not to think about her condition or write in her journal. She hides her suffering from her husband and takes great pains to show proper self-control when he is around (Gilman 222). When the narrator does mention to John that perhaps she is not getting better, “he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word” (Gilman 225). With no intellectual activity and no one to converse with, the yellow wallpaper becomes her primary stimulus leading her...
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...Symbolism has a very effective meaning in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper short story. Symbolism is defined as “the practice of representing things by symbols, or investing things with a symbolic meaning or character” (Dictionary.com). Firstly, the wallpaper symbolizes a variety of the narrator’s senses. Throughout the story, her senses change and the wallpaper also changes. The wallpaper shows how someone who suffers from a mental illness has different perspectives on their emotional surroundings and self-perception. Next, the house the narrator is kept in and the ugliness in the patterns of the wallpaper help represent the outlook of a woman’s repression. All in all, the wallpaper symbolizes the events in which the narrator finds herself trapped...
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...change the choices characters are able to make and the way society views the character’s actions. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner the time period and physical location confines characters and affects the outcome of the story. Gilman and Faulkner limit their characters in temporal and spatial setting to show the limitations of women in the physical, mental, and social aspects of life. First, Gilman...
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...or switching locations. The descriptive details that authors uses helps the reader set the tone for the story. In “The Lottery” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” both authors use very descriptive details not only to help the reader visualize the setting, but to help the reader make a connection with the author and the characters. “The Lottery" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" the settings for each story is similar in many ways. The author describes the setting of “The Lottery” in a small village, it was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. (Jackson 290). The reader can clearly see the village on this perfect day, they can feel the heat of the sun, smell the grass even the flowers as they bloom. Jackson says that the children gathered first they tended to gather together quietly before they broke into play, soon the men gather, surveying their own children and talking, then the woman wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after (Jackson 290-291). The tone she uses is calm, everything was normal nothing was out of place everyone was acting as if it was just another day. “The Yellow Wallpaper” the setting is in a colonial mansion set back from the road with a beautiful garden with hedges, and walls with gates that lock (Gilman 227). The narrator describes the setting to the reader as a peaceful...
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...Depression The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman brings to light the mistreatment of women’s mental health issues in the late nineteenth century in the American society. Rena Korb is a writer and editor says, “’The Yellow Wallpaper’ commands attention not only for the harrowing journey into madness it portrays, but also for its realism” ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 284). In the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," a woman falls into postpartum depression and her doctor recommended a treatment called the “rest cure,” which contributed to her madness because her condition was not yet understood and therefore never diagnosed. The story "The Yellow Wallpaper” was based on Gilman’s personal experience...
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...Lack of Creativity and Isolation in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents an unnamed woman who gradually spirals into a state of mental psychosis. Gilman sought to bring attention to the unfair treatment of women in the nineteenth century. She uses this story to reveal to the audience that the narrator’s insanity stems from her isolation from society, and her inability to be expressive and creative through writing. Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is locked away in an isolated room, which was supposed to cure her mental disorder but instead it makes her worse. With the windows barred and the doors locked she is secluded from society. She wishes to go visit her cousin Henry and Julia, but John forbids her by telling his wife that “[she] wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after [she] got there; and [she] did not make out a very good case for [herself], for [she] was crying before [she] had even finished” (Gilman 92). The constant isolation causes her to focus only on the room in which she is living in, and more specifically the yellow wallpaper. She becomes obsessed with analyzing and examining the wallpaper and it causes her to become further insane. She says, “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (Gilman 93). The narrator realizes that the wallpaper is an annoyance to someone with a normal mind. However, for her, she...
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...Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and its contemporary criticism Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a time when it was customary to consider women as the weaker sex, and in need of constant care and protection. There has been an overwhelming amount of literary criticism throughout the following century, with the purpose of establishing Gilman’s message. Most critics seem to agree that it is a strongly feminist text, targeting the patriarchal society of the late 19th century. Elaine Hedges sums up the most common readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in her essay. She herself then argues that the text’s essentially feminist point is emphasized by the fact that the narrator is destroyed by society, where she can never get free. Initially, she debates between two possibilities of what happens to the narrator in the end: she is either liberated in her madness or is defeated by it. Then she proceeds to consider the implications of the wallpaper itself. According to critics referred to by Hedges, the entangled pattern of the wallpaper itself represents a crucial text and it has been argued that this text is not written by the narrator. Instead, it is the text of social conventions and rules presented to her by her husband, and through him by the male-dominated society, where she is not allowed to write her own story. This is one of the reasons why her text then becomes “hopelessly encrypted in fantasy” (Hedges 225). Other interpretations connect the...
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