• Home Page
  • Desolation In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins

Desolation In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins

Improved Essays
Show More
Have you ever felt trapped, isolated, or even like you’re going crazy? If so, then you know what Charlotte Perkins Stetson felt like. Charlotte wrote a story called the yellow wallpaper and this piece of literature or tackles many subjects that would not become civil rights issues until many years later. Charlotte wrote the story based on the experiences that happen in her real life, which adds an eerie feeling while reading this story. It really makes you stop and think about how things used to be when dealing with mental health and the family unit. Charlotte choosing to write in this style allows the reader to be immersed in the story and identify with the protagonist. Charlotte Perkins was a very talented writer and in her story “The Yellow …show more content…
You really felt for her when her whole world started to crumble and she was being put in that room all alone and was being discouraged to not write, the one thing that brought her joy. “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word” (Perkins 649) . We really felt the anguish with her husband walked in on her and thought she had gone bonkers. “she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. “ (Perkins 654). The woman in the wallpaper is another interesting character; it is like a mirror being held up against the protagonist she is saying her situation with her detached. She can see that the woman behind the wallpaper wants to escape, but she herself does not have the courage to get up and walk out of the room. Her husband is an interesting character, he wants the best for his wife, but yet he will not allow her to leave her room and constantly insist that she is ill. It is as if he wants her to get better, but will not give her the treatment that she needs, or in this case, the treatment she doesn’t need. He locks his wife in a room for so long that she eventually begin to unravel and go crazy. Hey even allows a woman to come in and do the duty of a wife and a mother while his real wife is locked up in a room “Of course I didn 't do a thing. …show more content…
One of which is the wallpaper, it is a bright yellow and it is supposed to promote healing to the protagonist yet it is ultimately one of the things that break her down. “I don 't like our room a bit. “ (Perkins 648). It eventually drives her crazy and she is not able to paint her happiness or healing. “Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.“ (Perkins 650). The windows represent freedom and the life she can have if she can only get out of the oppression of her husband, but alas, there are bars on the window, which prevent her from escaping. It shows the role of her husband how though he is trying to help her he is ultimately hurting her. “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. “ (Perkins 650). Her journal entries are ways of showing how she’s trying to fight back and keep our creativity and individualism alive. She is told that she should not write, she continues anyway because she still wants to have her career. The child was a symbol of her motherhood. Just that the husband had taken away many other things with him trying to help, when he took the baby away, he took away one of the key pillars of her life which were being a mother and that broke her down. “Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.” (Perkins

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Yellow Wallpaper Conflict
    • 810 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Yellow Wallpaper Conflict

    The stage of depression is shown in this story when the narrator is unable to do what she loves, which is wiring. The yellow wallpaper represents the oppression of women, the wallpaper is simply an ugly patter and unpleasing to the eyes. The paper on the wall forces the narrator is go crazy it goes on and on and makes no sense to her, but her emotional state starts to change all of a sudden. Over the course of the story, the narrators begins to find comfort in the ugly yellow wallpaper. She gradually begins to see a female figure trapped behind the patter of the wallpaper and realizes that both she and the figure was suffering from oppression and imprisonment. As she becomes so engrossed with the women on the wall she suddenly begins to loss the certain desire she had to be the perfect wife and…

    • 810 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    The Narrator In The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1138 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The Narrator In The Yellow Wallpaper

    The narrator is clearly being stifled, going insane. The symbol of the yellow wallpaper hold significance to this effect. The wallpaper represents a few ideas, such as the narrator’s own mind, the narrator’s subconscious, and the economic and social dependence of women on their husbands (Triechler, 64). As the story progresses, the wallpaper evolves from simply being ugly and unclean - the narrator refers to it as “that horrid paper” (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, 470) - to holding entities behind the pattern. It could be argued, based on the loss of her individuality due to the ‘rest cure’, that the narrator sees herself as the woman in the wallpaper, ghostly and trapped. This woman is looking to be set free; the narrator describes one night when “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, 474). In addition, the woman behind the pattern of the wallpaper represents several ideas, such as the narrator herself, the narrator’s subconscious, and the idea that all women are trapped in the domestic sphere in the Victorian Era (Triechler, 64). The wallpaper itself takes on more and more significance to the narrator the longer she spends locked in this room. In other words, with the loss of more and more of her sense of self, the more important and meaningful the wallpaper becomes. She seems to transfer…

    • 1138 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Control Of Women In The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1001 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Control Of Women In The Yellow Wallpaper

    The narrator does not want to be in the room her husband makes her live in. The windows are barred and the bed is bolted down. This is a subliminal clue of control. The walls are covered in the horrible yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is peeling leaving the narrator feeling repelled when she looks at it. John leads her to believe there is not enough room in the other rooms except for the cellar. She chooses to stay in the big room. As time goes on, she grows fond of the room and eventually the wallpaper. The narrator spends most of her time alone, leaving her with not much to do other than look at the wallpaper. Her primary form of entertainment has become attempting to figure out the wallpaper’s pattern. Her obsession grows, the pattern of the wallpaper becomes clearer. The wallpaper begins to resemble a woman “stooping down and creeping”(385) behind the main pattern, which looks like the bars of a cage, symbolizing the way the narrator is trapped in her…

    • 1001 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Psychological Stages Of The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Psychological Stages Of The Yellow Wallpaper

    The narrator goes through a rollercoaster of emotion throughout this story. In the beginning of the story she is suffering from postpartum depression so her husband locks her away in the attic. Being bored out of her mind and stuck in the room for 3 months she starts to be intrigued by the specific most minor details of the room like the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. She decides to keep a secret diary from her husband for relief from the depression. From that point, her true thoughts are hidden from the outer world, and the narrator begins to slip into a fantasy world. Then things go downhill from there when, “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern,…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Personification In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Personification In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a mentally ill woman and her husband’s time at a vacation home. The story details his attempts to nurse the woman back to health. The story is set in Victorian times and the themes of the story reflect that. While staying in the home, the narrator is often cooped up in one bedroom. This isolation, coupled with society’s expectations of women at that time, cause her to dissolve into a complete nervous breakdown. “The Yellow Wallpaper” utilizes imagery, characterization, and personification to show the struggle of a mentally ill woman during the 19th century.…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    The Theme Of Death In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 1021 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Theme Of Death In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    She views the wallpaper to be atrocious, “I never saw a worse paper in my life… they suddenly commit suicide- plunge off at outrages angels, destroy themselves...,” (Gillman,1999, pg. 76). And even though she does not want to sleep in that room, John states that in order for her to get better she must rest in a room with lots of windows in order to get fresh air. He shows no sympathy towards the narrator and her troubles and instead tells her that she is simply imagining everything, “He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows...,” (Gillman,1999, pg. 77). It was uncommon for middle and upper class women to suffer from nervous tremors as a result of the creation of femininity as a result of their marital discontent and being unfulfilled with their lives. Women sought to be independent however, they were forced to fill domestic roles, “Childlike, nonassertive, helpless without a man content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home,” (Bordo, 2014, pg. 746). The narrator who is unable to do any activities that might exert her or write was slowly being drawn to madness by being confined in the nursery, in which she began to see eye within the wallpaper that would follow her around everywhere, “A recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes...blinking are everywhere…the eyes go all up and down the line…”, (Gillman,1999, pg. 78). John threatened her that if she did not start to get better, the narrator would be sent to Weir Mitchell – that only worsened her condition, where she would constantly be in tears. Slowly but surely she became to identify herself with the wallpaper as a result of no one taking her illness seriously, “there is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish…

    • 1021 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Great Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 1625 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    The Yellow Wallpaper was a fantastic short story that showed confusion, heartbreak and loneliness. The Yellow Wallpaper was written by the woman who goes by the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The main characters for this short story are the Narrators who’s a female that might or not might go by the name of Jane. John, the narrator’s husband and Jennie, John’s sister. The Yellow Wallpaper was written from Charlotte when she at the time suffered from a personal mental illness she was going through, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. It shows a women going through different states of her lonely life of having a husband who was her therapist driving her into madness. Her husband was supportive of her but he really never listened to…

    • 1625 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Summary Of The Yellow Wallpaper: Imaginative Liberation
    • 1039 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Summary Of The Yellow Wallpaper: Imaginative Liberation

    In the opening scenes it shows her daily life and how her husband’s oppressiveness and superiority over her forces her to keep her thoughts to herself. Unfortunately the narrator is forced to confine her thoughts on paper and uses it as a social outlet to cure her sickness. “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”(Gilman 480). The reader can conclude that the narrator’s husband is unaware of the ongoing problem that his wife is having, and seems to have his own opinion on how she will get better. In addition, Marjean Purinton, an English teacher at Texas Tech University, drew upon literary criticism of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that concludes “…women were expected to marry and that marriage itself with its obligatory child-rearing expectations, often confined women to the home, isolated for other women and their own selfhood’s” (par.18). Clearly this quote briefly describes the mental and physical confinement women were faced with in the past, and allows the reader to empathetically side with women in the twenty first…

    • 1039 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Metaphors In The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Metaphors In The Yellow Wallpaper

    She starts to go delusional because of this and because of her being locked away in a room due to her husband’s orders. “The front pattern does move- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Perkins, page 8). She begins picturing a woman trapped behind the wallpaper and watches her every move. This metaphor is interesting because she is seeing someone else suffer from the same thing she is. She sees a woman trying to escape from the gender roles in society and try and be free to do her own thing, much like the narrator herself. The narrator lives her life through the woman in the wallpaper; because she pictures her going outside in the daylight and pictures her doing things that she would never be allowed to do herself. In the end of the story the woman tears the wallpaper off of the wall. Halfway through her doing this, her husband walks in. He begs her to stop, and finally for the first time she does what she wants, she keeps going and does not listen to his orders. The wallpaper is ripped and represents her freedom. She chooses to no longer live the way society or a man wants her to, but she chooses to live life for herself.…

    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper Woman
    • 752 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Yellow Wallpaper Woman

    The narrator obsesses over studying its pattern. She eventually thinks she sees a woman behind the wallpaper and describes, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 368). This is symbolic of the barrier between women and their roles in both marriage and society behind which they are trapped. In this time, women were stuck in their roles within the household. Being a good wife, mother, and managing the house were a married woman’s duties. The men were the ones who got to leave the house, work, and have authority in their roles. Because of her depression, the narrator is unable to fulfill her role as a woman in that society. Not long after the narrator discovers the trapped woman, she is convinced she sees many women, as she states, “The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!... And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that’s why it has so many heads” (370). Symbolically, the wallpaper is trapping women in oppressive roles, but to try to get out is strangling; however, the narrator is determined to set them free. In the end, she tears down the wallpaper, the barrier, and begins creeping around the room. When John finds her, she declares, “I’ve got out at last…And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me…

    • 752 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins
    • 1441 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins

    The Yellow Wallpaper was Charlotte Perkins Gliman 's reaction to the rest cure that psychiatrist Silas Weir Mitchell had prescribed to her when she became depressed after the birth of her first child. Gilman believed that the cure had not only been ineffective, but had caused her depression to worsen. Gilman wrote the story to challenge Dr. Mitchell to alter his treatment of neurasthenia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman used symbolism within the yellow wallpaper to challenge the effects that the treatment for neurasthenia was having on women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes the setting in which the narrator lives symbolic of the oppression of women who were prescribed the rest cure for hysteria in the 1800 's in order to challenge the efficiency of…

    • 1441 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    Belonging In Peter Skrzynecki's Immigrant Chronicle
    • 1318 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Belonging In Peter Skrzynecki's Immigrant Chronicle

    The character 's connection towards the patriarchal society is somewhat unimpressed, 'John is a physician and perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster! ' The use of irony and a sarcastic tone suggests a sense of alienation to society and the earthly routine. The persona here doesn’t feel connected or attached to her husband or relatives and she felt like she could not be true to herself in their presence. She always had to hide her feelings and thoughts to avoid being further constrained by them. The persona’s first impression of the wallpaper was 'committing every artistic sin '. Her rebellious attitude to the wallpaper implies the symbolic nature which becomes an allegory for patriarchal society and her lack of connection to it. This is further reinforced when she projects an image of herself attempting to escape the wallpaper (symbolising society) 'they get through, and then the pattern strangles them off '. The personification of the wallpaper represents a constricting patriarchal society preventing her from belonging to something else, and as such the wallpaper reflects her…

    • 1318 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More
  • Superior Essays

    What Is The Repression Of Women In If I Were A Man By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 1225 Words
    • 5 Pages

    What Is The Repression Of Women In If I Were A Man By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    The narrator is sick, yet John, “a physician” believes she is exaggerating the severity of her illness (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 489). John’s recommendation of treatment for his wife is to “not work” (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 489). The narrator questions her husband’s strategy, but “feels basely ungrateful” when she doesn’t appreciate the care he has for her even if she feels what he prescribes may not be the best for her (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 490). The narrator feels she needs to write and keeps a secret journal for John “hates to have [her] write a word” (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 490). This ultimately represses her creativity and self-expression. To distract herself from thinking about her sickness, the narrator turns to the wallpaper in the room, which “pronounces enough to constantly irritate and provoke study”, foreshadowing an obsession with the wallpaper. In the first entry of the narrator’s journal she continues to doubt her husband’s treatment. Being isolated with no one to talk to and nothing to do does not lessen her anxiety, in fact, it only feeds into it. The narrator personifies the wallpaper using a simile comparing the pattern to “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 492). She also thinks she’s able to see “a formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind” the “front design”…

    • 1225 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
    Read More
  • Great Essays

    Theme Of Pain In The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1134 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Theme Of Pain In The Yellow Wallpaper

    To cope with the distinct lack of stimulation, she develops a keen interest in the wallpaper. At first she despises it and said “I never saw a worse wallpaper in my life.” (Gilman 648). Slowly, however, she becomes increasingly attracted to it. Eventually she starts seeing figures in the wallpaper, she interprets it as a woman who is trapped. Through her deep pain of being separated from her life she imagines a woman, like herself, who is…

    • 1134 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
    Read More
  • Improved Essays

    The Yellow Wall-Paper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 1239 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The Yellow Wall-Paper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    The wall-paper in this story serves as a visualization of her mental state, and as her sanity is slowly ripped away, so is the paper. In her first writing, she describes the color of the paper as ‘unclean’ and ‘sickly’, both words that were commonly used to describe mentally ill patients at the time. As the narrative continues, the woman starts to see a dark figure behind the paper. She states “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gillman 795). The way the narrator speaks of the being behind the paper greatly shows how she feels about herself. If you assume the wall-paper is a symbol for her sanity, you are left to conclude that the woman behind the paper is the narrator, trying to break free of the restraints placed on her by those who believed they knew best. The “silly and conspicuous…design” (Gilman 795) is a representation of how she, as a woman, is expected to behave, while all she actually wants to do is to escape both the metaphorical constraints of society and the physical constraints of the room she has been confined…

    • 1239 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
    Read More

Related Topics

Ready To Get Started?
Discover
Company
Follow
©2023 Cram.com
Privacy Policy |  About Ads |  Site Map |  Advertise  | 
  • Cookie Settings