Remarkable advances have been made in the treatment of mental illness. There are no longer asylums full of rooms with patients behind locked doors. There are no longer executions held to eliminate the mentally ill. There are no longer ceremonies held to sacrifice one’s own kind for the superstition of bettering the future. Mental illness presents in many distinct forms of varying severity. Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder are among the ever growing list of illnesses that affect daily lifestyle. Shirley Jackson, Charlotte Perkins Stetson and Flannery O’Connor produces short stories whose characters exhibit idiosyncratic symptoms of mental illness.
Superstition is an irrational belief that an object unrelated …show more content…
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the author of The Yellow-Wallpaper, details a narrative in which the main character suffers a heart breaking existence. The unnamed main character appears to suffer from extreme anxiety causing her so-called husband, John, who is practicing as a physician, to move her to a large home where she is secluded to one room. As the story continues, this “home” is seeming more and more like an insane asylum. The woman is locked away in a single room and is forbidden from leaving. It becomes uncertain whether John really is the woman’s spouse or rather her physician yet impersonating a husband to please the woman. The woman begins the narration by giving a detailed description of the yellow-wallpaper plastered on the walls of the room in which she resides. She explains her utter hatred for the wallpaper and claims “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.” The woman grows to like the wallpaper and begins to believe she is seeing shadows creeping about within it. The room she is in seems to be very worn. The woman was told that the room was used for a nursery prior to
Superstition is an irrational belief that an object unrelated …show more content…
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the author of The Yellow-Wallpaper, details a narrative in which the main character suffers a heart breaking existence. The unnamed main character appears to suffer from extreme anxiety causing her so-called husband, John, who is practicing as a physician, to move her to a large home where she is secluded to one room. As the story continues, this “home” is seeming more and more like an insane asylum. The woman is locked away in a single room and is forbidden from leaving. It becomes uncertain whether John really is the woman’s spouse or rather her physician yet impersonating a husband to please the woman. The woman begins the narration by giving a detailed description of the yellow-wallpaper plastered on the walls of the room in which she resides. She explains her utter hatred for the wallpaper and claims “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.” The woman grows to like the wallpaper and begins to believe she is seeing shadows creeping about within it. The room she is in seems to be very worn. The woman was told that the room was used for a nursery prior to