The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

Characters:The narrator, (Jane). She has a depression and a slight hysteria →isolated in a big house and don't do anythingJohn, her husband with whom she has a baby boy. He's a physician.Weir Mitchell, a physician and a writer ➡ invented the rest cure. He actually really existed and he gives those piece of advice to Perkins.other minors characters: Mary (a nurse ?); Jane's brother (a physician too); Jennie, John's sister ( a housekeeper); her mother, Nellie and children; cousin Henry & Julia.

biography: Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist intellectual. Gilman was concerned with political inequality and social justice, but the primary focus of her writing was the unequal status of women within the marriage.Gilman is mostly known for “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which was considered shocking in its time. autobiographical but in a more personal mode. Indeed, “The Yellow Wallpaper” draws heavily on a particularly painful episode in Gilman’s own life.In her marriage and not long after the birth of her daughter, CPG was stricken with a severe case of depression. She was referred to Dr. Weir Mitchell, then the country’s leading specialist in nervous disorders, whose treatment was a “rest cure” of forced inactivity. Mitchell believed that depression was brought on by too much mental activity and not enough attention to domestic affairs. For Gilman, this treatment was a disaster ➡ nervous breakdown. Once she abandoned Mitchell’s rest cure, Gilman’s condition improved. Leaving behind her husband and child (scandalous), she embarked on a successful career as a journalist, and publisher. She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” soon after her move to California, she uses her personal experience to create a tale that is a description of one woman’s fall into madness.

The Yellow Wallpaper:-the tradition of the psychological horror tale as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe“The Tell-Tale Heart”= point of view of an insane narrator.-Gilman also draws on the tradition of the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, which often featured spooky old mansions and young heroines determined to uncover their secrets.-Gilman’s story and her moment-by-moment reporting of the narrator’s thoughts are clearly a move in the direction of the sort of stream-of-consciousness narration used by such writers as Virginia Woolf.

plot: the narrator is living in a house in which she feels uncomfortable, in a room she hasn’t picked out, and is forbidden from engaging in the one activity she enjoys. No wonder she becomes absolutely obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room. She begins fanatically tracing the pattern of the wallpaper and soon becomes convinced that there is a woman trapped within the paper. Shortly before the narrator is due to to depart the house, she decides that she must free the trapped woman by stripping the wallpaper off. When her husband comes into the room, the narrator declares that she is now free. Upon seeing his wife creeping around the room peeling the paper off the walls, John faints. The narrator continues creeping around the room.

opinion: As the woman is trapped in the wallpaper, the narrator is trapped in her gilded cage. maybe she's actually in an asylum and not in a hall contrary at what she thinks- I like the way madness is represented from the inside, not from a doctor or the people that are not in her head. For her she's not mad it's the other who don't understand

gothic :the setting (secluded mansion), characters (domineering husband and vulnerable young wife), and themes (isolation/imprisonment and their psychological effects). the madness of the character; the description of the wallpaper

feminism: The Subordination of Women in Marriage For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her.He toys with her, giving her hope and then disappointing; He plays the role of the dominant male figure in gothic stories, who forces his female victim into solitude while he is away. The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she retreats into her obsessive fantasy, The Evils of the “Resting Cure” As someone who almost was destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s “resting cure” for depression, it is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this ineffective and cruel course of treatment. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a mind that is already plagued with anxiety can deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and kept from healthy work