Joni Mitchell

The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is a young married woman who is receiving treatment for postpartum depression. Her husband, who happens to also be her doctor, is treating her condition with the rest cure; a relatively common treatment for mental disorders during the late 1800s. As required by this treatment, she is to refrain from all intellectual and creative tasks, as they will hinder her recovery. Though her husband loves her and is well-meaning in his care, he fails to see that this…

As I sat down trying to decide what to write this analysis paper on, I couldn’t fight the urge to write it about Bertha Mason Rochester and the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. There are so many similarities. A misunderstanding husband traps each of them, they themselves are trapped, they are stuck in their own minds which drive them mad, and so much more. These similarities include the use of a gothic tone, a sense of male superiority, mistreatment of space, and the mental instability of…

Mental Marriage The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, represents the relationship between the nineteenth century concept of marriage and the deterioration of the narrator’s mental health. Throughout the story, the narrator’s husband, John, continuously keeps tabs on her and controls the majority of her actions. The imbalance of power between John and herself was not uncommon for a nineteenth century marriage. According to the narrator, she and her husband John were “mere ordinary people”…

Gillam’s The Yellow Wallpaper and O’Conner’s A Good Man’s Hard to Find both imitate the horrific practice of dehumanization. After digging deep and analyzing the characters in each text the practice of dehumanization is uncovered. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gillman illustrates the husband/doctor prescribing treatment that treats his wife in a dehumanizing way. Likewise, O’Conner demonstrates dehumanization through the Grandmother and her use of titles in replacement of names. Throughout both The…

does not have any kind of authority and who must follow what she is told. Gilman uses this technique to show the manipulation men use to control women and the family dynamic they have. A similar case happens when John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell if she “… doesn’t get better.” (134) This can be interpreted as a parent threatening her child with a punishment. Helena Znaniecka Lopata, an American sociologist, explains that in the relationship of traditional marriages “society embedded…

In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, women’s systemic oppression in the 1800’s is revealed to her audience. In Gilman’s time, a girl was born into a world constructed to keep her out of certain spaces; a world that would consistently seek to control her and reduce her to a status far below the man beside her. A woman lived in a system of power hierarchies that sought to silence her. In her short story, Gilman spoke to an audience that would outlast her forever…

throughout the story, helping to draw a more personal connection. The story of the woman is written as an autobiography as said by Mary Dunn, “She describes the treatment of women during a rest cure prescribed for nervous disorders by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell” (par. 1). In an indirect way she depicts her mental state as it diminishes over time and her plead for liberation towards the end. She expresses this in several ways, over time you can begin to see the obstruction of the way she writes in…

Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s short story ‘the Yellow Wallpaper is an excellent example of the toxic gender roles in the Victorian or Edwardian era. In the short story the gender roles of the society effects the relationship between the narrator and her husband, John. This can be seen through the way John treats the narrator throughout the story, how the narrator allows John to keep the power in the relationship and how in the end the narrator refers to herself as ‘free’ after the wallpaper drives…

Mental health is a wide topic that is a main element in the texts I have chosen. It can be argued that alongside the loss of sanity, comes isolation. Whether the isolation comes before or after, the isolation seems to act as a catalyst for the depletion of the mental health of characters. Shakespeare has used mental health in many of his works such as Macbeth and King Lear and this use of mental health as a subject matter is one of the reasons why Shakespeare is renowned now. Arguably, one of…

Chelsea Helms Lauren Allen English 101-Section 070 11 November 2014 The Sickness of “The Yellow Wallpaper” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main female character is diagnosed with a “nervous condition” and is forced to live in an isolated environment with only her husband and a select few people for the summer. Throughout the story, her husband John, who is also a physician, treats her much like a child because of her supposed illness. During the 1800s, psychology had…