Melancholia

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wanted to spend her life actively “living” (xv). She was devoted to work and public service, especially that of the women’s suffrage movement, and she viewed her life as an ongoing verb, in which she needed to be constantly moving forward and working. She was an exceptionally prolific writer, publishing “nearly 500 poems, several dramas, roughly 675 fictional works, and over 2,000 works of nonfiction” in her lifetime (xii). Because of her abundance of literary work,…

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Sylvia Plath’s novel, ‘The Bell Jar’, scrutinises how both women, the unnamed narrator and Esther, become mentally unstable. Both protagonists exploit their real life situations in their story and novel to emphasise how being a woman living in a patriarchal society has caused mental breakdowns. Moreover, they make attempts to explore and understand their suffering of depression and the possible ways to overcome it. The short…

clinically insane, specifically after Madeline’s death. During the time between Madeline’s death and when he meets Judy, he gets depression, and spends some time in a psychiatric hospital. As one of the doctors puts it, “He’s suffering from acute melancholia, together with a guilt complex”. Roderick Usher also seems to suffer from the same kind of brand of obsession when his sister temporarily passes away despite already suffering from several bizarre symptoms. His mental state’s decrepitation…

Bipolar can affect a person’s life and also their friends and family around them. I struggle with Bipolar and depression. So does my mother. I have to take medication in order to help me function because my moods are all over the place. It is a struggle every single day but, my medication does help out with it a bunch. I have been on medicine for over 10 years. If you do not try and get it treated your life can be a mess trust me I have been down that road and it is honestly not fun. It has…

“The Yellow Wall-paper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is written in first person and consist of numerous journal entries. The narrator of the story is a woman who struggles with herself because she suffers from a nervous condition and faces depression. She is confined in an isolated house, on bed rest. She states that the house “is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village” (844). This house is separated from real life and society and her emotional…

account of her personal experience with the rest treatment in “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.” To show the connection between her and her story, she states, “For many years [she] suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” for which a doctor “put [her] to bed and applied the rest cure,” advising her to “‘live a domestic life as far as possible’” (245). Immediately, the doctor demands that she relinquishes her intellectual…

the sparse body of texts hinders her from completely understanding the complexity of her grieving process. For instance, Didion alludes to studies that refer grief as a temporary state of manic depression. She cites Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia:” “The act of grieving… ‘involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life… never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment’” (qtd in Didion 34). Freud asserts that the act of grieving…

Act 1 Scene 2 is a key moment that includes Hamlet’s first soliloquy, during which the audience start to understand the complexity of Hamlet and his personal state of melancholia. Shakespeare’s use of syntax, fanatic language and striking imagery develops the tension within Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude, while feeding the reoccurring theme of misogyny. Shakespeare uses intense juxtapositions and the theme of corruption to strengthen the characterisation of Claudius, through the eyes of…

Mom, hair messed up and shirt unbuttoned down her chest, she had just come home from work, its 11 p.m., and she is just now walking through the door disheveled. Why does she have to do this? Why does she have to cheat on dad? It's been like this for months. Mom coming home late at night, making excuses to my dad…The worst part of this whole situation is that dad is oblivious and believes her. I guess that would be good if they had a healthy relationship, choosing to believe the lies and see the…

as tightly as I could, but when nothing changed, I knew it was real life. Perplexed by this enigma, I jumped up and rushed to my grandmother’s room; I got to the door and the first thing I saw was the same expression on every face in the room, melancholia. My mother, aunt, and grandfather were surrounding her bed crying. Hesitantly, I walked through the doorway and saw my grandmother’s…