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Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published in 1892. The story touches upon themes of patriarchy, misogyny, identity, disenfranchisement, and mental illness. Told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, the reader gets a glimpse into the effect of patriarchy on individual women and on women collectively. The story begins when the narrator and her husband John spend the summer in a holiday house. The narrator admits that she has "temporary nervous depression," but that her husband, even though he is a physician, does not recognize that she is sick. Instead, he believes that his wife should simply refrain from all work, including writing, and be house bound. When she protests, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." Thus, Gilman makes a poignant statement about the nature of heterosexual marriage within the first few sentences of the short story. The summer home is splendid -- the family is well-to-do. The grounds are gorgeously...
Thus equating his wife with a child, John reveals the extent of his misogyny and his complete disrespect for the woman he married. If the narrator was already depressed at the beginning of the story, she now descends deep and fast into a pit of personal despair.
The narrator even blames herself, internalizing her confused feelings of anger and guilt. She feels guilty for thinking negative thoughts of her husband, and tries to convince herself -- and the reader -- that he has her best interest at heart. Continually, she claims that he loves her and wants her to get better. The narrator also states, "I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition." The reader, sympathizing…
Yellow Wallpaper Breaking Free: The Ironic Liberation of "Yellow Wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a quintessential feminist story, even though it can be interpreted on many levels within that rubric. The narrator is married and has a child; she is thus engaged in some of the strongest trappings of a patriarchal society. However, she is removed both physically and spiritually from her stereotyped role as wife and mother. The
Yellow Wallpaper portrays that the protagonist in the story, Jane is mentally disturbed. Due to various factors and social pressures, Jane is affected with a mental condition that causes her to lose her mind and be out of touch with reality. The diagnoses that can be made about Jane from The Yellow Wallpaper are of Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type and Bipolar Disorder Type I. Schizophrenia- Paranoid Type As defined in the DSM-IV (APA,
As the narrator is denied access to the world and the normal expression of her individuality, so she becomes a true prisoner of the room with the yellow wallpaper. Her life and consciousness becomes more restricted until the wallpaper becomes an animated world to her. There is also the implied suggestion in this process of a conflict between the rational and logical world, determined and controlled by male consciousness, and
I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still... It keep me quiet by the hour" (Hunt, 179). With this, it is clear that Gilman sees herself as trapped in a very disruptive and confined world, one which ultimately drives her insane; also, this mysterious woman is a symbol of her physical self caught within a maze of confusion and despair, all because of the "yellow wallpaper"
Yet, in this case, the freedom that the author is talking about is not necessarily the liberation of women from the oppressive male society, but the freedom of each individual with mental problems to having a socially integrated life, with little or no confinement that would also make the mental problems develop. In conclusion, although it may seem that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written with a feminist
As the text by Davison (2004) contributes, "given that the narrator in Gilman's tale is a femme couverte who has no legal power over her own person -- like her flesh-and-blood counterparts at the time the story was published -- and that her husband is a physician whose pronouncements about his wife's illness are condoned by a spectral yet powerful medical establishment, it is no wonder that his wife grows