...Krista Dorn Professor Aguilar English 1302-059 July 22, 2015 Narrator Analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, gives readers a first hand glimpse into the mind of a mentally disturbed woman fighting numerous and constant battles within herself and with others, one of them being post partum depression. The story is set in a historical period when it was typical for men to dominate over women. As illustrated in this story, the mentally disordered woman, possibly named Jane, is clearly at the mercy of her physician husband, John. He tells her what she can and cannot do, where she will sleep, and when she will take her medicine. Stetson consistently portrays the narrator as a progressively mentally disturbed woman that cannot seem to escape the thought that the wallpaper in her room takes on a life of its own while having some sort of power over her that she is not able to control. The unreliable narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” piques unceasing curiosity while describing more and more detailed and subjective ways she is reaching total insanity; telling the story from a first person point of view makes this story much more captivating than if told in a third person limited type narrative. By the woman’s early admittance that she is suffering from a temporary nervous depression, she immediately establishes herself as an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is specifically defined as a...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper Argument Throughout Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s life, she had been surrounded by the idea that men are superior to women. She refused to give into that idea though. She published works titled Women and Economic, With Her in Ourland, and The Man-Made World. Women and Economics is about how women who depend on men economically stunts the growth of women and the rest of the world. We see she has always had the ideas that men should not superior to woman. Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a representation of society’s of views on men and women. The narrator’s husband, John, is a symbol of society. Since John is a wealthy man, he was able to get an education, become a physician, and make the decisions for the family. Because the narrator was woman, she was supposed to be in charge of taking care of their child, cook and clean. When John told her she needed bed rest, she was unable to preform her wifely duties. At the beginning the narrator thought she was fine and said three different forms of “what can one do?” in the first chapter. The repetition of asking these questions means that there is not much she can do because she is a woman, and the man makes the decisions. When the poem was...
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...The Culture of The Yellow Wallpaper Through her many stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, developed the notion of how being a strong independent woman can be inspirational to all. The expression of her personal feelings and opinions behind the guise of a seemingly fictional story brings new life to the story itself. During the nineteenth century, there were many stereotypes of what was expected from women. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman composes the story of a woman who suffers from postpartum depression and finds an infatuation with a wall covered with yellow wallpaper. Seeing that Gilman herself has experienced this form of mental illness, we can analyze the context of the text and see the reflection of her own life through...
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...Symbolism has a very effective meaning in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper short story. Symbolism is defined as “the practice of representing things by symbols, or investing things with a symbolic meaning or character” (Dictionary.com). Firstly, the wallpaper symbolizes a variety of the narrator’s senses. Throughout the story, her senses change and the wallpaper also changes. The wallpaper shows how someone who suffers from a mental illness has different perspectives on their emotional surroundings and self-perception. Next, the house the narrator is kept in and the ugliness in the patterns of the wallpaper help represent the outlook of a woman’s repression. All in all, the wallpaper symbolizes the events in which the narrator finds herself trapped...
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...Through Gilman writing she shows us that is a lack of understanding when it comes to the mentally ill. In the story the Yellow Wallpaper it says “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a man. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patient with faith, an intense horror of superstition. That there is nothing the matter with one but temporarily nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do.” (pg.154) Today, Doctors who treat mental illness give temporary drugs that have permeant effects on the body and mind with extreme consequences. In the article, Anatomy of an epidemic psychiatric drugs and the astonishing rise of mental illness in America it states Big drug based paradigm of care that is fueling this epidemic. Big pharmaceutical drugs increase the likihood that a person will become chronically ill, and induce.” The second most...
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...Thesis/Introduction In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the nameless main character goes through a lot including an emotional breakdown, which causes her to do crazy things and was in a mission to find the wallpaper. The author didn't want the reader to discover the main character's true identity. This was probably because the nameless character suffered from depression. However her lack of identity caused her brother and husband to believe that she wasn't "sick". Depression was viewed as a disease that crazy people suffered from not "normal" folks. The nameless character from the story suffered from depression. Throughout the story, they would isolate her which meant she couldn't work or write, thinking that maybe she needed some alone time. In the text "John is a physician, and perhaps that is the one reason i do not get well faster"(Gilman 1).When it came down to her brother and husband they wouldn't think she was ill even though they were physicians. She felt that in order for her "nervous depression" to get better she had to set her self free and go on a journey/mission which involved looking for "The Yellow Wallpaper". The depression made her start seeing stuff mostly the stuff she saw was positive, but she saw some disturbing thing in the bedroom which appeared to her that had various shapes and...
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...Jacob Perrotti 1 Ms. Hendra EN-111 Essay “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin are two different stories with the women both suffering from an illness. One of the women are sufferering from a mental illness and the other physical, and both are bery emotionally detached from their husbands. In “An Story of an Hour” Mrs. Mallard is at first devistated from her husbands death but soon realizes this means she is free from him, and in “The Yellow Wallpaper” it seems that John is very controlling and doesn't pay true attention to his wife. The illnesses of both the women affect their relationships in very similar ways. To begin, though two different stories, both women seemed to be emotionally distant from their husbands. Emotional detachment could stem from complacency in the marriage but I believe it's their illness that is the cause of the disengagement. During the era in which these stories were written, marriages were an economic arrangement which had very little to do with love. In both stories, the couplese seem to have an ideal marriage, which eventually turns to aloofness, in part due to the women's illnesses. Perhaps the husband thought that she was too fragile, or it was a one sided relationship. This could be bacuse ending a marriage during this time was unheard of. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffers from mental illness which ca be read...
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...How many nights have you spent in bed tossing and turning because the woman from your wallpaper keeps creeping around your room? For most people the obvious answer is ‘None of course’ but for some, the question wouldn’t seem that foreign. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” we are immersed into the mind of a mentally ill young woman who is forced into solitude as a supposed cure for postpartum depression. We read her story as if reading her diary; an intimate look into the mind of someone who feels isolated, trapped and confined. After giving birth to her son, our unnamed protagonist begins showing signs of postpartum depression, which was not considered significant in the eighteen hundreds. She struggles understanding...
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...by SULTAN QABOOS UNIVERSITY (29 Dec 2014 03:14 GMT) The Pedagogical Possibilities of Covering Gilman’s Wallpaper Karla J. Murphy In his introduction to The Pedagogical Wallpaper, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock notes how the pedagogical diversity of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” prompted him to collect essays for this book. He goes on to explain that “given the ubiquity of the text within various academic settings, I was also struck by the absence of attention to the text within pedagogical contexts. Despite the large (and steadily growing) body of criticism to the story, very little of it explicitly addresses its importance as a tool to facilitate learning or various ways in which to make use of the text in the classroom” (3). As a collection, Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper contains informed, detailed, and diverse analysis that attempts to shore up the absence of “pedagogical possibilities” concerning Gilman’s transgressive short story (9). Among the contributors are a MOO space specialist, a Gilman scholar, a queer theorist, an existentialist, a formalist, and several reader/student-response theorists. Because each essayist presents a distinct critical perspective on Gilman’s text, each essay is likewise concerned with “how the narrative teaches and how to teach the narrative” (5). Thus, it seems to me that Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper resonates with Pedagogy’s conviction that teaching is central to our work as scholars and educators, no matter...
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...Debra Bronstein English 1B Short Story Essay Prompt Essay Due: Monday 10/15 at the beginning of class (100 points) Please write a 4-5 page essay. All papers should be typed, double-spaced, 12-point font (Times New Roman), with one-inch margins. All papers must analyze how the rhetorical/formal/symbolic/narrative elements of the short story contribute to your understanding of the text. Please review these terms from your literary terms quiz and your class notes to remind yourself how authors deploy them in the stories. Please choose one of the following topics. Note: I ask a lot of questions within each of the topics because I want to give you many options to consider; however, this does not mean that you have to answer all the sub-questions. Use them as guides to jumpstart your thinking. 1. Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Jewett’s “A White Heron,” Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” track a particular symbol throughout the short story. Focusing on one of these stories, show how the author uses the development of the symbol in order to reflect the demise or spiritual growth of the main characters. Hint: for “The Things They Carried, you can focus on the word carry rather than on a specific individual symbol. 2. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are both narrated by unreliable narrators who go crazy. Focusing on one of these stories, how does the author portray insanity...
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...Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and its contemporary criticism Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a time when it was customary to consider women as the weaker sex, and in need of constant care and protection. There has been an overwhelming amount of literary criticism throughout the following century, with the purpose of establishing Gilman’s message. Most critics seem to agree that it is a strongly feminist text, targeting the patriarchal society of the late 19th century. Elaine Hedges sums up the most common readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in her essay. She herself then argues that the text’s essentially feminist point is emphasized by the fact that the narrator is destroyed by society, where she can never get free. Initially, she debates between two possibilities of what happens to the narrator in the end: she is either liberated in her madness or is defeated by it. Then she proceeds to consider the implications of the wallpaper itself. According to critics referred to by Hedges, the entangled pattern of the wallpaper itself represents a crucial text and it has been argued that this text is not written by the narrator. Instead, it is the text of social conventions and rules presented to her by her husband, and through him by the male-dominated society, where she is not allowed to write her own story. This is one of the reasons why her text then becomes “hopelessly encrypted in fantasy” (Hedges 225). Other interpretations connect the...
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...“Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it” Elizabeth Wurtzel. The three short stories; “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King all have unreliable narrators. Although all of these narrators suffer from mental illnesses, the narrator from, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the most insane because she contributes to the most heinous acts. The narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” cannot witness reality because of hallucination. Others believe that the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” is more unreliable because he suffers from delusions and paranoia of an evil eye. While this statement is...
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...dependence. The man is the provider and the woman is the caretaker. The second type is a mutual admiration, where man and woman share pure feelings with one another. The last is a marriage of intellectual companionship, where the man and woman are friends. The “transition of marriage in earlier times is that of convenience” (Fuller). These marriages lead many women to feel heavily burdened, both mentally and physically. In the literary works “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, both women are characterized as victims oppressed by their marriage and their strong desire to be free. In each story, the women depicted are oppressed in their marriages. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the unidentified woman is taken to a summer house by her husband, John, so she may recover from her condition of a nervous depression more commonly known today as post-partum syndrome. Here, she is isolated from her friends and family and confined to a room with barred windows and “revolting” yellow wallpaper. John, also a physician, thinks it is best to keep her mind clear. He “has cautioned (her) not to give way to fancy in the...
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...Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an activist for independence for women, which was promoted through her popular stories and lecturers in the 20s. She was born on July 3rd, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut and raised with no farther in poverty. Gillman wrote the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 to emphasize the poor treatment of women and found a way to portray her own depression, by expressing it through the story. To summarize the story, it captivates a woman who is suffering from post-partum depression after having a child. Her husband, John, brings her to a mansion to retreat for the summer and restrains her upstairs in a nursery room. Truthfully, deep down the woman believes something is wrong with her, but her husband insists that she...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper: A Woman's Struggle Pregnancy and childbirth are very emotional times in a woman's life and many women suffer from the "baby blues." The innocent nickname for postpartum depression is deceptive because it down plays the severity of this condition. Although she was not formally diagnosed with postpartum depression, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) developed a severe depression after the birth of her only child (Kennedy et. al. 424). Unfortunately, she was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who forbade her to write and prescribed only bed rest and quiet for recovery (Kennedy et al. 424). Her condition only worsened and ultimately resulted in divorce (Kennedy and Gioia 424). Gilman's literary indictment of Dr. Mitchell's ineffective treatment came to life in the story "The Yellow Wallpaper." On the surface, this gothic tale seems only to relate one woman's struggle with mental illness, but because Guilman was a prominent feminist and social thinker she incorporated themes of women's rights and the poor relationships between husbands and wives (Kennedy and Gioia 424). Guilman cleverly manipulates the setting to support her themes and set the eerie mood. Upon first reading "The Yellow Wallpaper," the reader may see the relationship between the narrator and her husband John as caring, but with examination one will find that the narrator is repeatedly belittled and demeaned by her husband. On first arriving at the vacation home John chooses...
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