Problems Leading to Insanity in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she illustrates the effects of many different situations that lead to the narrator 's insanity. The narrator 's “nervous condition” only intensified by the “remedy” of isolation and her restrictions in society. Isolation is beneficial to the mind, but not for a prolonged period of time. As a female during the 1890’s, the narrator was immensely restricted due to her role in society. Current research shows how these two treatments have only increased the severity of depression and can lead the mind to psychosis.
In the 1890’s, a female who sought medical treatment, for what we know as depression and anxiety today, would be …show more content…
She expresses how her husband may be one of the complications prolonging her healing process. The narrator writes, “John is a physician and perhaps . . . that is one reason I do not get well faster” (768). Her husband even “assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 770). We see throughout her journals that she only becomes more irritated by her husband 's attempts to alleviate the problem. The narrator had a right to be angry. Due to more recent research and experiments, we now know that the antidotes physicians used in the past only added fuel to the …show more content…
1). The narrator’s problem was similar to the 32-year-old, Sarah Shourd’s experience. While hiking the mountains in Iraq and with friends, they were accused of spying, captured, and “ were kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell,” Micheal Bond writes. After almost 10,000 hours of hardly any human contact, Sarah’s mind went senseless. Relatively identical effects were found between the reactions of Sarah Shourd and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Beginning with extreme hallucinations. Sarah told New York Times ”at one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realised the screams were my own” (Bond para. 3). Similar, the narrator experienced hallucinations, when she believed she saw a figure moving behind the wallpaper. As days passed, she realizes it is a woman trapped. “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me. . . and it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern,” the narrator writes (Gilman
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she illustrates the effects of many different situations that lead to the narrator 's insanity. The narrator 's “nervous condition” only intensified by the “remedy” of isolation and her restrictions in society. Isolation is beneficial to the mind, but not for a prolonged period of time. As a female during the 1890’s, the narrator was immensely restricted due to her role in society. Current research shows how these two treatments have only increased the severity of depression and can lead the mind to psychosis.
In the 1890’s, a female who sought medical treatment, for what we know as depression and anxiety today, would be …show more content…
She expresses how her husband may be one of the complications prolonging her healing process. The narrator writes, “John is a physician and perhaps . . . that is one reason I do not get well faster” (768). Her husband even “assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 770). We see throughout her journals that she only becomes more irritated by her husband 's attempts to alleviate the problem. The narrator had a right to be angry. Due to more recent research and experiments, we now know that the antidotes physicians used in the past only added fuel to the …show more content…
1). The narrator’s problem was similar to the 32-year-old, Sarah Shourd’s experience. While hiking the mountains in Iraq and with friends, they were accused of spying, captured, and “ were kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell,” Micheal Bond writes. After almost 10,000 hours of hardly any human contact, Sarah’s mind went senseless. Relatively identical effects were found between the reactions of Sarah Shourd and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Beginning with extreme hallucinations. Sarah told New York Times ”at one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realised the screams were my own” (Bond para. 3). Similar, the narrator experienced hallucinations, when she believed she saw a figure moving behind the wallpaper. As days passed, she realizes it is a woman trapped. “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me. . . and it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern,” the narrator writes (Gilman