Isolation In The Yellow Wallpaper

In the passage from “The yellow wallpaper,” by charlotte Perkins Gilman uses literary techniques such as imagery to analyze the narrators portray to her attitude towards her environment. A women begins to explain her morals about the way the wallpaper made her feel. She explains how her fascination with the wallpaper and a strange figure that she imagines moving around in its

Confinement Kills People of the world have a situation on their hands. The situation is considered armed and dangerous. It has multiple confirmed kills. The situation, better known as Isolation, attacks the mind and body of its victims. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Stetson writes a story about a woman name Jane treated for postpartum depression.

The progressive degeneration in the narrator’s mental health and the slow but sure spiritual assertion in the female protagonist are worked out with the help of the central symbol of yellow wallpaper” (Rao 44). Moreover, the wallpaper illustrates the metamorphosis of Jane from a state of confinement to liberation. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates a woman’s unique path from mental and physical confinement to liberation of them both.

Most people understand to some extent the ill effects of extreme isolation, but what they do not realise is that even a reasonably stable person can fall into madness and hallucinations in a frighteningly short amount of time. Studies have been done and stories have been written, but isolation affects each individual differently. Anyone who disagrees must have not done their research. After hearing what isolation truly does to the mind, then can we make our stances.

The Restriction of a Wallpaper The narrator in 'The Yellow Wallpaper', whose name we never learn, is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression. She is being treated by her husband, John, in a big beautiful house that is far off the road. Her husband, as well as others, believes that isolating her from everyone and everything will cure her. John is a physician, so he and the narrator convince themselves that he knows what is best for her. After spending some time alone in this house, while being inconsiderably taken care of by her husband, the narrator's condition worsens.

Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

In the beginning, the narrator finds the wallpaper merely unattractive. Her internal dialogue contains descriptive and flowing passages. She makes calm, astute observations about the estate, the room, and her husband. However, as her confinement to the room progresses, so does her obsession with the wallpaper.

However, she must overcome her limited perspective to uncover this beauty, conveying how narrow perceptions can “blind” individuals. The depiction of her melancholy perspectives and loneliness is prevalently illustrated in the “Locked Window” page, where the foreground of a dull monotone brick wall, is against the salient image of a window, barricaded by a square-shaped lock with the word ‘regret’ engraved into it. The overwhelmingly locked window symbolises to readers, of the protagonist’s sense of imprisonment as ‘regret’ further

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.

The wallpaper of the room of the narrator gives an impression of imprisonment when she narrates that “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” where this statement gives an impression of her helplessness and feels herself a prisoner and she wants to go out from this imprisonment. The yellow paper is taken as a symbol of imprisonment because of the reason that the narrator does not want to live in this yellow wallpaper room and she does not feel well here but her husband does not agree upon her decision for changing the room and force her to live in this room. This makes her fed up from this jailbird life and finally finds treatment of her husband towards her dubious and wishes for her freedom from this jail. The symbolism yellow paper in the “The Yellow Wallpaper” made clear from another statement of Gilman which is “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” [5].

When talking about the house, the narrator's use of parenthesis: “I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it”, conveys the her desperation at the physical confinement. While the wallpaper is a symbol for her figurative confinement. The pattern of the wallpaper is “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars”. The use of anticlimax suggests that the woman is imprisoned and “trapped” at any time, no light can help her. The pattern slowly confines the narrator’s mind behind those imaginary “bars”, so the house becomes her prison cell and drives her to madness.

My mom’s advice of hearing multiple sides of a story has become very influential in my day to day life as well as my approach to literature. The practice of considering multiple sides of a story becomes critical when reading novels written in the first person point of view. In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, we are only

The "windows are barred" (648), and the unmovable bed "that is nailed down" add to her feeling of imprisonment. (650). Thirdly, the narrator suffers from oppression.

Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

The story reflects the idea of feminism during the 19th century because the main woman character is put into an asylum for depression; however, the room is described to have "the heavy bedstead" and "barred windows" (488). The description