The Yellow Wallpaper

Improved Essays
The Yellow Wallpaper The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story and first published in 1892, used author’s had experienced of the postpartum depression to create a powerful fictional narrative which has a profound meaning for women. Gilman wrote this story in the first person, and used dramatic and realistic style to form of a journal showed to the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world. The author pulls the reader in by her use of explicit details and imagery of the yellow wallpaper through the eyes of the narrator, which clearly identifies the mental state of the main character, and to express the …show more content…
John took control the narrator’s life, curbs her creativity and writing, and she only was allowed to stay in the yellow wallpaper room. At first, narrator tried to fight against the growing lethargy that controls her, and she even challenges John’s treatment of her, but since John is the man, the doctor, and therefore the authority, then he may be right. And Jennie, John’s sister who happily assumes all the traditional duties of a housewife so the narrator is free to sit in her room all day. Meanwhile, Jennie helps John to monitor the narrator’s behaving in the time when John was not around her. As a result, narrator was completely confined from the societal and family, and the yellow wallpaper itself becomes a symbol of the narrator who feels trapped in her roles as wife and mother. In order to struggle to get free from her mental prison, narrator had undergone a painful process from depression to the end of the madness. At the end of the story, narrator identified completely with the woman in the wallpaper and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. She said that “I’ve got out at last” “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you …show more content…
After her daughter was birthed, the narrator is clearly suffering from postpartum depression at the beginning of the story, and her mental state is worsened by her husband’s medical opinion that she was confined to the room which with add yellow wallpaper. In fact, the patient is more in need of care, accompany, and encouragement from her family and friends, but her husband “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” ‘(page 78), even John ignored the pain her stuffed, narrator stated that, “John does not know how much I really stuffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer; and that satisfies him” (page 78). John haughtily restricted narrator’s freedom because of her postpartum depression. When the narrator was threatened by her husband with being sent to Weir Mitchell if she does not get better quickly, she says: “I don 't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so” (page 80). Although the narrator repeatedly asks John to change the treatment over the course of the story, he refuses to acknowledge her requests, believing that he had total authority over the situation. This is also a reflection of the society conditions of the time, but either way, John abuses his power as both a husband and physician and forces the narrator to remain in an oppressive

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