Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'Nervous Breakdown Of Women'

Register to read the introduction… Her torpid brain is an irritated organ, but once she engages in the "gymnastics" of following the paper's pattern her neuroses calm into studious activity. Her diary entries mark her increasing fascination with a heavily patterned wallpaper as she turns her excess energy toward understanding its bizarre forms and speculating on the history of the room itself. Borrowing a scientific method, she uses reason, principles, and laws to trace the absurdities of form surrounding her. Natural imagery provides ready comparison points, and the observations she records in her diary read like a perverse natural history of the room. She identifies "a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase" in the paper (9), "a florid arabesque" (12), "a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convulsions" (12), and, finally, "strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths [that] just shriek with derision" (18). These irritatingly ornate forms perhaps owe more to the imagination of their beholder than to anything inherent in the paper's nature; it seems that the subject who sees subversive versions of mushrooms, as well as sick and strangled life forms, reveals her own sick and strangled psyche by her articulations. But amid …show more content…
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[Reference] | WORKS CITED | Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The 'Nervous Breakdown' of Women." The Pedagogical Wallpaper. Ed. J. A. Weinstock. New York: Lang, 2003. 67-75. Print. | _____. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3-19. Print. | Knittel, Jana. "Environmental History and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'Herland.'" International Review of Science Fiction 35.96 (Spring 2006): 49-67. Print. | Stratton, Susan. "Intersubjectivity and Difference in Feminist Ecotopias." FEMSPEC 3.1 (2001): 33-43. Print. |

[Author Affiliation] | -HEIDI SCOTT, University of Maryland, College Park | Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications |

References * References (4)
Indexing (document details) Subjects: | Ecology, Environmental economics, Short stories, Literary criticism | People: | Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935) | Author(s): | Heidi Scott | Author Affiliation: | -HEIDI SCOTT, University of Maryland, College Park
Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications | Document types: | Feature | Document features: | References