The Yellow Wallpaper

             Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story that takes a feminist approach to husband-wife and mother-child relationships at the turn of the 18th century. Gilman writes about a woman suffering from what I believe to be post partum depression that turns into schizophrenia. She is at the same time suffering in the hands of her husband, John. He is a high standing physician who forces his idea of treatment onto her causing her to go mad. The main character in this story is a nameless narrator who adheres to her gender role. She is a mother and a wife and is incapable of doing either since being diagnosed by John with "nervous depression and hysterical tendencies."
             The narrator has been isolated by her husband in "a colonial mansion" that is "standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village." She has been "prescribed what many nineteenth-century physicians (including Freud) believed to be the necessary recuperative regimen – rest1." In order to insure her rest, she is forced by John to reside in an unsettling room at the top of the house. Now inside she "is further confronted by objects of restraint: the "rings and things in the walls which she assures us were used by the children in their "playroom and gymnasium" but we later realize were used instead to secure her; the pinioned bedstead; and the windows, "barred for little children;" John calls her, after all, his "little girl"2". The most unsettling aspect of the room is the wallpaper. The narrator describes it as "one of those sprawling patterns committing every artistic sin." When she asks John to change the paper he tells her that if it was not the wallpaper she was obsessing over than it would be another aspect of the house. The wallpaper is what she focuses on and by neglecting her own wishes and committing herself to the wishes of John her illness is allowed to...

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The Yellow Wallpaper. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 02:12, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/9400.html