Essays on Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was published in 1892. The story introduces a candid female protagonist who’s isolation from society, and from her writing, drives her insane. Written from a first person perspective, the story allows the reader to become personally involved with the narrator. Gilman uses symbolism throughout the story, two examples of which are the wallpaper and the wallpaper pattern. The story reveals interesting clues about how mental illness was treated at the time, and how women in particular were repressed by society. Through the use of a first person narrator and symbolism, Gilman ...

An Assignment Submitted by

Introduction For many centuries women were deprived of their natural rights to control their life and even body and yet the struggle for equal rights is still continuing. At some point, feminism acquired a negative connotation that people today associate with the fanaticism and misandry. It is quite difficult to explain why the movement that released so many women from their invisible prisons is criticized by the modern society. A lot of women have fought to overcome discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping of womanhood by changing the laws, altering the views of the society, and fighting back their oppressors. In ...

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the typical Victorian marriage is constructed as a prisoner from which a woman is only able to escape when she becomes insane. Her insanity becomes her only way of defying her husband, and gaining freedom. The author’s feminist argument in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is skillfully constructed by creating a protagonist whose growing mental instability is narrated from her own perspective. However, ironically, at the same time with her worsening mental state, she evades the social rules and pressures which had entrapped her in an unhappy marriage. While her mental condition ...

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, is a short story that was written in order to describe the total inefficiency of medical treatment for postpartum depression in its era, and to create a greater awareness of the lack of medical understanding of the condition. As such, the storm describes the primary character’s deteriorating mental health, as she descends into madness as a result of her depression. More specifically, her description of her environment, and the personification of the wallpaper directly represents her deteriorating mental condition. As the wallpaper’s descriptions become more vivid and charactuerized, the narrator’ ...

Medical experiences are completely dependent on an individual's gender. Men and women, in most cases, are more prone to illnesses, which differ in nature. Men are more prone to conditions, which affect their physical health while women tend to suffer from conditions, which affect their emotion/psychological health. This paper seeks to support the notion, which states that medical experiences depend on the gender of the patient in question. In the case of George Dedlow and the narrator in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the two protagonists, who differ in gender, undergo completely different medical experiences. They are, however, both adversely affected ...

Our modern world is full of implacable disparities. All living beings are classified into different categories. The animals, for example, will often be categorized into those who can run, feel coming danger and be able to escape it. The biggest diversity ever is probably that of the gender difference and gender stereotypes. No matter how much time passes, there will always exist that inevitable opposition between two sexes. Though stereotypical views of men and women have highly reduced in recent years, many people still believe that some of the gender-role stereotypes retained till the present day. The two genders ...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a fictional depiction of her own experience. Once, she was forced to undergo a course of treatment for what the doctor felt was a severe nervous breakdown. The psychiatrists in those days, in the nineteenth century, were in the habit of looking at a woman as a domestic animal and diagnose her mental disorders as a result of her distorted domestic life. Gilman fictionalizes her experience in order to highlight the state of the subordinated life of a woman in her days, particularly the suppressed state of a married woman. ...

“The Birthmark” is a short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1843 and “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman published in 1892. “The Birthmark” deals with a husband’s determination to make his wife look perfect while “The Yellow Wallpaper” deals with the subordination of a woman to her husband which drives her crazy. Both Georgiana and the wife from “The Yellow Wallpaper” are trapped in a marriage in which their husbands are dominant and who determine their fate. The similarities between “The Birthmark” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are related to the fact that ...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an outstanding American writer and a huge supporter of women’s rights that reflected in her literary works. One of her most famous one is the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” that is written in the form of a diary of a young lady, who was diagnosed with a mental disease and spent a time living in a room with yellow wallpaper that led to her demise. The story can be viewed as semiautobiographical, as Gilman wrote it after she had a postpartum psychosis. In her story she uses figurative language to reveal the theme ...

The depiction of a setting as the main hindrance or destructive force behind the fall of a protagonist is evident in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner. As the authors develop the settings around the main characters’ homes, the mentioned texts go on to give the otherwise lifeless structures roles of their own as they affect the inhabitants in one way or another. To that end, Emily’s house symbolizes her gradual deterioration while the unknown narrator regards her house as one would ...

In the Victorian period The Woman Question was a widely discussed topic, and engaged many Victorians, both male and female. The ideal woman of that age was associated with tenderness, understanding, innocence, domestic affection and submissiveness. The woman had to maintain the status and integrity of her husband, being always the devoted and pleasing angel in the house. Coventry Patmore supported the idea that women should be extremely pure and selfless in his popular, best-selling long poem “The Angel in the House” (1854). A woman that failed at such responsibilities was labelled either mad or hysterical. During the Victorian ...

“A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman both have a theme of psychological issues that are present in the main female characters of both stories. In each story the women show signs of depression through their isolation from the world. The strange and questionable behaviors displayed by each of the main characters are not handled correctly and if anything, it is exacerbated by the men in their lives. The stories both show the tragedy and turmoil that women have gone through in previous era’s when men made a large ...