Category: Short story

Both stories “Young Goodman Brown” and “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been,” include protagonists that communicate with forces of evil in their normal lives. A few may believe that the evilness comes from within the characters themselves, but others may believe comes from within the Devil himself. The evil figure in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is way more dangerous than the protagonist in “Young Goodman Brown” because the Devil’s presence is more evil, dangerous, and life threatening.

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Arnold Friend manipulates Connie into getting in his car and going for a ride. “Dont’cha wanta see what’s on the car? Dont’cha wanta go for a ride?” (Friend, 6). Connie gets a strange feeling that she shouldn’t enter the car so she decides not to and she doesn’t enter the car. “He’s kinda strange (Connie, 2) The author points out how strange ARnold friend is. He wears tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt. Connie also finds it strange how he communicates with her and tries to convince Connie to join him.

Towards the beginning of the story, at home Connie appears childish, but away from home, she strives to appear sexy, mature, and quite seductive. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright pink on evenings out; her last which was cynical and drawling at home…but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else… (Oates, 4). For the most part, her two sides seem to exist in harmony. She argues with her mother and sister at home, but otherwise her transition from child to woman and back again seems to happen effortlessly. However, the fact that Connie has two sides rather than one stable, fully developed personality highlights the awkward, fearful stage is in as an adolescent. Throughout the story, we see that she is unsure and who she is- what is actually her in what is a fabricated image of who she wants to be. Her highly confident smirk and laugh at home give way to a more uncertain giggly laugh and girly, pink, mouth-which actually makes her seem highly immature. The gap between her former self and new, adult self is uncertain and observed as dangerous. When arnold friend appears, he exploits it.

Connie lunged for the phone and tried and failed when attempting to make a phone call. Arnold has repeatedly assured her that he won’t come inside the house unless she touches the telephone, which, until this moment, has deterred COnnie from trying to call the police. However, after Arnold’s remarks become more overtly threatening, she panics and makes a move for the phone, which she is then too terrified to do anything with. “She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her again and again with no tenderness’ (Oates, 7). These violent, explicit lines strongly suggest that Arnold has entered the house and his raping Connie-the “stabbing” and “no tenderness,” as well as her extreme distress, all suggests that this violent moment is a rape.

In conclusion, when Connie finally decides to cross the threshold, the last vision the story gives us is Arnold friend, who is surrounded by, “Vast sunlit reaches of land”. On how we interpret this vision resolve how we observe Connie’s final decision, which is an act of defeat. Therefore, because Connie gave in, Arnold friend, the protagonist in “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been” is way more dangerous than the protagonist in “Young Goodman Brown.”

In a battle between a female’s freedom and a male’s dominance, a void exist in between. Charlotte Gillman, a well-known writer, narrates the story of how a woman suffering from mental illness is stuck within the void. She writes the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to discuss how the woman is seeking help from her husband, John, who is a physician. He loves her but his male dominance blurred his choices making him not realize that he couldn’t help her. However, are those women doing this because they are suppressed, and they think that is the only way to feel free? Is this freedom? Do we blame such mistakes on them or the community? Are they even considered mistakes? Freedom and peace of mind are basic human rights, regardless of gender. Taking away such rights can lead to horrible consequences. Females are known to express freedom through emotions. Even though some might argue that you can’t place a woman equal to a man and that each gender has its own role, this is not a personal issue, it is a communal issue. How each community treats its females will determine the rank of that community because, from a feminist point of view, women are the essence of every community.

Reading The Yellow Wallpaper will give readers the whole truth, the bigger picture, and the unknown conversation with the self. People might not realize how important freedom is. Freedom is a basic human right, and the violation or penetration of such a right will have gruesome consequences. At the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s husband diagnoses his wife with “a slight hysterical tendency”, so he prescribes a rest. The narrator doesn’t question his authority because he is a well-known physician. However, they had an argument about the room that they will spend their holiday in. While she wanted a small room on the ground floor filled with roses, John insists on the room on the top floor of the house, with bars on the window, and “stripped off” yellow wallpaper. This small argument the narrator had with her husband resembles the whole problem, in fact, it is the main problem. John thinks that the top room is much bigger and airy, however, the narrator is plagued by the details of the room, like the bars covering the window, and the bothersome “ripped off” wallpaper. It is just a huge cage. The narrator is facing some psychological issues, is trapping her going to help in any way? Yet John won the argument and she stayed in the ugly room on the top floor. As a part of John’s prescription, the narrator is forbidden from work, and by work John means the use of mind, like writing, and engaging with her own imagination. John is not realizing that he can’t order one to not use their mind, even if this one was his wife. Scientifically, our mind is working as long as our senses are open, the work done by the mind is involuntary, and a human can’t control this fact. From a realistic point of view, imagination is beautiful, our minds are beautiful, and you can’t take that away from a person because you have a degree, or because that person is a female. However, what John doesn’t realize is that work is a way for her to blow off some steam. It will be a much better and more efficient solution for her mind. The period of the story was 1892, and at that time males believed that females should spend more time at their house and take care of the house, while only males can work. Therefore, John unconsciously was trapping her in that cage.

The narrator’s situation made her feel helpless, weak, and hopeless because her husband isn’t taking her problem seriously, or at least as seriously as he takes other people’s issues. John doesn’t view the narrator as his patient, he treats her as his wife. Therefore, most of his solutions will come out of love, but not for what’s really better for her. For instance, if a patient doesn’t like the method his/her doctor follows when treating them, they can simply tell the doctor, and the doctor will go for a new different method. Then why is this case different? Why is the narrator not getting her patient rights? Is it because she is a female? Is John stereotyping females? As a result, the narrator’s state got only worse, where she is trapped in that cage John made her, where she spends more of her time lying down just to limit her physical activity in order to be a “normal woman”. John’s method of treatment was self-control and that she shouldn’t engage with her friends and relatives but just focus on herself, however, this is just a result of John viewing the narrator as his wife and not his patient, he does not have the right-even as a physician- to prescribe self-control. Self-control should hail from within a person. His method is effective, but not in the narrator’s case. In the narrator’s case, the most effective and right method of treatment is self-expression, which is the exact opposite of self-control. Especially since she is a female in a time where females can’t express themselves properly because of sexism. The narrator should express herself in terms of wants and needs, to strengthen her sense of identity. Moving on, the narrator, fortunately, found a way of expressing her own identity, which was through the ugly wallpaper, after she noticed a creeping woman trapped in the pattern of the wallpaper. The narrator found herself in that trapped woman, and she realized that she is exactly in the same state as that woman. Where the pattern trapping that woman symbolizes her husband, and how he is controlling her desires, her needs, and shaping her identity. While John continues to ignore the concerns of his patient and considers her as a passive object of treatment, the narrator had to free herself, and that was only possible by freeing the woman in that wallpaper. In the process, the narrator got herself into that wallpaper, and then and only then she realized that the creeping woman wasn’t trapped, but in fact, was free and the narrator now is free. Freedom in the narrator’s case was only possible in the absence of her husband. Therefore, Gilman made it clear that the narrator is only free because she is in a place that her husband could never reach. Away from the noise of love and control, where she can really express and focus on herself.

As mentioned earlier, freedom is a basic human right, regardless of gender. People should preserve those rights, and ensure that their rights are preserved and others’ rights too. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman did a really good job of conveying such ideas, where Gilman uses irony to transfer multiple levels of meaning that conflict with or confuse one another. Overall, in order to live in a better world, we need to be better humans by preserving the human rights of both genders and valuing the existence and self-expression of females, because then and only then we will live in peace and harmony.

From the beginning of time, literary movements have practiced diverse methods in an attempt to portray the nature of humans and their struggles. The movement of literary realism began towards the end of the nineteenth century. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature defines realism as “the theory or practice in art and literature of fidelity to nature or to real life and to accurate representation without idealization in favor of close observation of outward appearances. The word has also been used critically to denote excessive minuteness of detail or preoccupation with trivial sordid, or squalid subjects in art and literature” (“Realism”). Charlotte Perkins Gilman satisfies the criteria mentioned in this definition in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Originally published in 1892, the short story realistically portrays what happens to the mind when faced with forced inactivity, and the human desire to overcome the feeling of powerlessness. “The Yellow Wallpaper” serves as an example of Gilman’s attitude towards realism through her tendency to deconstruct the idealized visions of gender roles and domestic life, mental illness and its treatments, and outward appearances and inner life.

A characteristic of literary realism includes the depiction of specific societal structures in a non-idealized style. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses the relationship between the narrator and John, to eliminate the more glamorous assumptions of gender roles and domestic life. The short story depicts traditional gender roles within a family unit as they were defined during the late nineteenth century. The husband, John, is protective, logical, and the ultimate decision-maker. He treats his wife as a child, referring to her as his ‘little girl’ and regularly brushing off her complaints. His wife, the narrator, is confined to their home, and not allowed to work or write. She is considered by John to be delicate, emotional, and self-centered. Gilman depicts a realism in the sense that she views gender roles and domestic life as dreadfully repressive rather than exceptionally traditional. Gilman validates this alternative view by writing, “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick” (844). John is her husband and should believe her when she says she is sick, but he doesn’t because of the traditional gender roles within a family unit. He is the ultimate decision maker in the relationship, and as a physician and husband, he is making the decision that she is not suffering from postpartum depression, assuring friends and relatives ‘that there is nothing really the matter.’ Gilman uses realism in her approach to gender roles and domestic life because she does not depict gender roles and domestic life through a glamorous lens.

A characteristic of literary realism includes the portrayal of the nature of humans and their struggles. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses the diary entries, that make up the story, to eliminate the more fictitious assumptions of mental illness and its treatments. The short story portrays the perception and treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.

The short story follows the slow decline of the narrator’s mental state, as well as John’s attempted treatments that only seemed to aggravate the decline. John is an example of a traditional attitude toward mental illness, he prescribes his wife self-control and advises against anything that may indulge her imagination or hysteria. His refusal to listen to his wife’s anxieties about her postpartum depression or to listen to any of her numerous concerns about their choice of room, leaving the house, and or her writing eventually contributes to her mental breakdown. Ultimately, she finds herself trapped, alone, and incapable of making her inner struggles understood. Gilman portrays realism in the sense that she views mental illness and its treatments as important and effective rather than irrelevant and useless. Gilman validates this alternative view by writing, “John is away all day and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (846). John’s refusal to listen to his wife’s anxieties about her mental state and his unsuccessful treatments only prove the perception and treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century. The feeling of powerlessness and the inability to communicate her inner struggles is portrayed to instill empathy among readers. Gilman uses realism in her approach to mental illness and its treatments because she does not portray mental illness and its treatments through a fictitious lens.

A characteristic of literary realism according to Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature is the “close observation of outward appearances” (“Realism”). In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses her short story’s form to eliminate the more melodramatic assumptions of outward appearances and inner life. The short story depicts the contradiction between the outward appearance and inner life of the narrator.

The story’s form gives readers not only the ability to look into the narrator’s inner life but the narrator’s husband’s misinterpretation of her condition as well. As her husband becomes convinced that she is improving, the reader observes her obsession with the wallpaper take a treacherous turn as her madness worsens. The logical John is not unable to understand the realities of his wife’s inner life, which is beyond his direct observation. His inability to understand the realities of his wife’s inner life causes him to faint due to shock when she inevitably, completely breaks down. Gilman depicts a realism in the sense that she views outward appearances and inner life as similar rather than contradictory. Gilman validates this alternative view by writing, “But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in the full chase” (848). The narrator’s descriptions of her home, specifically the wallpaper, add further light to the contradiction between outward appearances and inner life. Her powerful need to understand the inner life of the wallpaper that drives her to madness mirrors her attempt to understand her condition as well as the reader’s attempt to understand her story. Gilman uses realism in her approach to outward appearances and inner life because she does not depict outward appearances and inner life through a melodramatic lens.

Since the beginning, literary movements have practiced diverse methods in an attempt to portray humans and their struggles and they will continue to. “The Yellow Wallpaper” serves as an example of literary realism, the short story portrays what happens to the mind when faced with forced inactivity, and the human desire to overcome the feeling of powerlessness. Gilman’s tendency to deconstruct the idealized visions of gender roles and domestic life, mental illness and its treatments, and outward appearances and inner life creates a story that satisfies the definition of realism.

Works Cited

1. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, 9th ed., vol. C, W. W. Norton, 2017, pp. 844-855.
2. “Realism.” Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Merriam Webster, 1995.

Perkins Gilman’s extract (2016) highlights the patriarchal dominance of the domestic lifestyle and underpins the socially accepted archetypes for women during the Victorian era. The use of a female-gendered narrative voice, throughout the extract, emphasises the prejudice against female writing, despite its use as an escapism tool for the narrator, as well as reflects how patriarchal ideology influences the narrator’s judgment of her opinion as a woman. Examining the extract through the concepts raised in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (1996), accentuates the gender prejudice in psychiatric treatment, during the Victorian-era, and allows for the perception of the paranoia that being branded as hysteric created for women.

The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper disagrees with the rest-treatment she is prescribed, however, lacks confidence in her opinion as she recognizes the prejudice against her as a woman in society. Gilman’s repetition of the phrase ‘Personally, I’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.99) suggests the narrator does not value her opinion equal to that of a man, residing in her diary to express her disapproval, further reinforcing that patriarchal ideology has negatively affected her self-worth. Additionally, the protagonist sharing her viewpoint on ‘dead paper’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.98) emphasises the narrator’s use of writing as an escape or self-expression, unbound of judgment and patriarchal expectation of compliant femininity. Throughout The Female Malady Showalter addresses the concept of ‘Moral insanity’ (Showalter, 1996, p.29), exploring how diagnosing madness, especially for women, assessed their ‘deviance from socially accepted behavior’ and restraint of ‘domestic control’ (Showalter, 1996, p.29). John’s domestic manipulation of the protagonist’s route to treatment mirrors that of Victorian asylum in which ‘by molding and controlling the life of a lunatic, the psychologist hopes to reach, capture, and re-educate the truant mind’ (Showalter, 1996, p.30). The male characters refuse to acknowledge the narrator’s claim that her illness is serious and genuine on the basis that she is a woman, although, The Female Malady explores how ‘noisy’ and opinionated women were branded as insane and ‘silenced with the brank’ (Showalter, 1996, p.31); justifying the female narrator’s helpless compliance to her treatment, as well as shrewdness when wishing to write.

Despite accepting her opinion as subordinate in comparison to her male counterparts, the female narrator defies complying with socially accepted behavior through writing, however, the protagonist’s diary highlights the influence male figures have on her by subconsciously dictating her thoughts and emotions. The protagonist states she wrote in ‘spite’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.99) of patriarchal dominance, however, juxtaposes this by highlighting how writing so cunningly ‘does exhaust [her] a great deal’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.99). The italicization of the word ‘does’ creates a defeatist tone that further suggests the narrator is invalidating her own opinion and admitting the possibility of her male counterparts being correct. The protagonist declares ‘I confess it always makes me feel bad’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.99) when contemplating her condition, accentuating the defeatist tone through her writing and highlighting her reluctance to admit her compliance to John’s advice. The protagonist’s defiant rejection of her diagnosis, in comparison to her reluctant confession at the end of the extract, could further symbolize the influence patriarchal dominance impacts the narrator’s thoughts and emotions; As well as parallel the advised route of treatment for insane women, explored in The Female Malady, to ‘submitted respectfully to the will of the manly asylum superintendent’ (Showalter, 1996, p.31).

The female narrator suggests the dominance and reliability of John’s diagnosis are reliant on his ‘high standing’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.98) position in society. The extract reflects concepts explored in The Female Malady which states ‘Class remained a strong determinant of the individual’s psychiatric career’ (Showalter, 1996, p.26). John’s reluctancy to accept the narrator’s illness as genuine could be due to the stigma of the ‘mad woman in the Victorian Era, to combat this, the rich could avoid the stigma of diagnosis ‘by keeping mad relatives at home, or by seeking private care’ (Showalter, 1996, p.26). The ideology of ‘the rich’, regarding psychiatrists, is somewhat reflected through the actions of John as he brands the narrator’s seemingly genuine illness as a ‘slight hysterical tendency’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.98), a gendered diagnosis that he attempts to domesticate and undermine, suggested through the adjective ‘slight’, in addition to claiming it’s treatment is ‘air’ and ‘exercise’ (Perkins Gilman, 2016, p.98). The gendered diagnosis of hysteria in this extract could be perceived as a means to control and assert dominance over the narrator’s self-expression and limit her domestic, as well as creative freedom.

To conclude, Gilman’s use of the female narrative voice throughout the extract accentuates the oppression of the woman who wished to write in the Victorian era. Furthermore, applying concepts from Showalter’s The Female Malady to the extract emphasized the pressure on women to comply with societal patriarchal expectations to avoid fallacious diagnoses of insanity.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ looks at the harsh idea of sex jobs as they have been constrained on young ladies in the past due nineteenth century. The storyteller is made frantic by her failure to state her character.

The Yellow Wallpaper is composed as a request of diary sections from the point of view of a young lady who is tormented by post-pregnancy anxiety. The storyteller starts by portraying the gigantic, decorative home that she and her better half, John, have leased for the late spring. John is a reasonable man, a doctor, and their turn into the US is to a limited extent empowered by methods for his decision to uncover his enduring spouse to its spotless air and quiet ways of life together that she will almost certainly recuperate from what he sees as a slight agitation The storyteller whines that her better half will never again focus on her issues about her circumstance, and treats her like a child. She additionally presumes that there might be something odd and strange around the house, which has been unfilled for some time, however, John rejects her issues as a moronic fantasy. As a feature of her fix, the storyteller is taboo from seeking any intrigue besides residential work, altogether never again to assess her brain. She is specific misses the scholarly demonstration of composing and verbal trade, and this record is written in a journal that she escapes her better half. They flow into the room at the highest point of the living arrangement, which the storyteller assumes is a previous nursery since it has banned windows and stripping yellow backdrop. This anti-agents yellow backdrop turns into a noteworthy concentration in the story, in light of the fact that the storyteller becomes fixated on translating its obviously inconceivable, unreasonable styles. She keeps covering the journal from John and develops progressively increasingly fulfilled that the backdrop contains an insidious weight that compromises the total household. From her room, she will almost certainly observe a shaded path, the sound, and a congested patio nursery. When she will escape the eye of her better half and Jennie, his sister, she keeps up her take a gander at the backdrop and begins off advance to expect she can see a puzzling separated covering up at the back of the best example. She endeavors to influence her significant other that they should withdraw the house, however, he demands that she is upgrading and sees humoring her worries as empowering an unsafe, unfathomable nature, while what’s required is quality of brain. The storyteller’s misery and weakness keep declining. Her interest in the backdrop assumes control over her reality. In a progression of progressively fast journal sections, she portrays her advancement in revealing the mysteries and strategies of its example, as she grows an expanding number of paranoids about the goals of Jennie and John. She trusts that the decision is a crawling female, caught at the back of the bars of the best example, and will end up resolved to free her, and to keep up the name of the round of her ways of life from her better half and his sister. She astonishes Jennie breaking down a scratched depression at the divider and doesn’t confide in her reason that she had been searching out the wellspring of the yellow stains on the storyteller’s pieces of clothing. She begins off developed to save mysteries and methods even from her journal, and makes a starter, evening time endeavors to push off the backdrop at the eve in their takeoff. Afterward, while all the furnishings have been dispensed with from the room other than for the chewed and overwhelming bed stand, she bolts the entryway and tosses the key down onto the front power, after which continues to tear and tear at the pieces of the backdrop she will reach. Here, at the story’s peak, the frame of mind moves as the storyteller’s scholarly breakdown will end up whole, and in her franticness, she is fulfilled that she is the lady who moved toward becoming caught behind the backdrop. She begins off developed to sneak around the room in an unending circle, smearing the backdrop in a legitimate groove. John breaks into the room and finds her, and blacks out on the sight. She keeps crawling forever over the room, constrained to move over his arranged edge.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had an extreme early life after her dad left her own family. She was conceived on the third of July 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut to Mary Perkins and Frederic Beecher Perkins. She had just kin, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months more established than her. Her aunties, alongside exceptional suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker and essayist Harriet Beecher Stowe, supported her mom through this period. In 1884 she wedded Charles Walter Stetson and offered to start their solitary baby, a little girl. After the conveyance of her little girl, she experienced post-birth anxiety and was endorsed an ineffective unwinding cure by utilizing Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who guided her to comprehend the household commitments and avoid scholarly movement. She isolated herself from her significant other in 1888 and moved to Pasadena, California, and has turned into a vigorous voice in the women’s activist development, distributing broadly at the job of ladies inside the family. She wound up wedded again in 1900, to her first cousin Houghton Gilman. In 1932 she wound up perceived with bosom malignant growth and, in 1935, she ended it all on August 17, 1935, by methods for taking an overdose of chloroform, which she considered as most attractive to death toll with the guide of disease.

The yellow backdrop unmistakably speaks to the subject of opportunity and restriction at the leading premise of Gender. As the intention in the storyteller’s constrainment is her sexual orientation. This moreover composes a refreshing way of self-completion denied to the storyteller. The storyteller depicts composing certainly inside the story, trusting that it will help her sorrow. The story and message of The Yellow Wallpaper are established in an unmistakable class and social dynamic. The storyteller’s an individual from the best class; she and her significant other are rich adequate to take a mid-year off and have hirelings supply each need.

Analysis Essay

Answer the following question with at least 3 well-developed paragraphs. Paragraphs must have at least 5 sentences. Use details and specific examples from the text to support your answer. Please go beyond the literal answer and dig deep to analyze what it all means to the bigger picture of the world.

Identify what has driven the narrator to the brink of madness.

The narrator feels that she is in a prison-like facility. The man presents the domestic sphere as a prison and she feels trapped. She also feels like she is reminded to clean or take care of children. The immovable beds and unclear windows look as if it was made for someone crazy. The wallpaper gives her ideas of her being watched and surveillance like in a jail cell or something.

John makes it feel that the sphere is a jail to the narrator. He also makes it seem that her important personal issues and life problems aren’t a big deal to him anymore. All that right there brings madness to her. Jenny and Mary assume her identity as wife and mother which makes her feel more imprisoned. The narrator has no identity because the one from society has been taken from her.

It also bothers the narrator that besides her, Jennie and Mary don’t think of it as a prison-like place. Her husband John and towards the end of the story are both on each other’s bad sides because the narrator feels that he is taking away everything she cares about.

How does she try to free herself from this element?

The narrator has the ability to free herself from everything going on in this story. Writing is a huge tactic to help her not concentrate on her condition, but like it was said as the story goes on the narrator’s condition worsens and she gets insane.

She felt like the wallpaper in her room could help her because to the narrator the wallpaper was driving her crazy. She was trying to figure out the pattern before anyone else, she was obsessed with it, and she would kill for it. At the beginning of staying in the nursery, John would find her secretive journal, she was forbidden to write or anything of that nature.

As time went on she would get better at hiding her journal so no one would find it. It was the narrator’s only way to have peace. There was barely anyone to talk to or express her feeling as if it was a getaway. John would treat her as if she was stupid and had no respect but she didn’t really mind because, in that time period, women played a role where they were not as important as the men folk.

So the only thing to free her was her journal, her journal was the only thing she had left. It was the only thing that kept her free, she had written in it just about every day.

What is her greatest desire?

When she got to the nursery, she was assigned to a yellow room where the windows were bare and the bed was immovable. She had thought it was meant for babies, it was made for mentally insane people but she didn’t know. The yellow wallpaper in the room was torn and had pieces missing, but the wallpaper had designs on it.

Time goes on in the nursery where she put and she studies the wallpaper every day. Remember she is at a mental institution and her illness gets worse day by day. So as days go on and she studies the wallpaper she seems to become obsessed with it in some type of way. As the obsession grows she starts to see things in the wallpaper such as a pattern, then she smells something, and then the narrator sees a woman inside the wallpaper. At that point, she tries letting that woman in the yellow wallpaper out and during the process, the insanity is growing.

That was her desire at the end of the story, to let the women in the wallpaper out. She tore the wallpaper, picked every spot, and studied every spot of the wallpaper. Her desire was to get the women out of the wallpaper. Another little desire of hers was to escape or leave, just to have freedom. The wallpaper symbolizes the lives of domestic women, the deeper you get and the more you get stuck. The color yellow represents illness or weakness.

What is the central irony of the story?

Her condition gets worse because her husband and doctor do not understand her sensitive and artistic nature. Those two are more like a negative than a positive in her life. The crazy fact in the story is that if the narrator were empowered to recover, in a way she could’ve cured herself.

She feels different about her cure when she is prescribed fresh air and exercise and no ‘work’ till she is fine again. To escape her depression she writes; however, because she has to do this activity secretly to not suffer “ Heavy opposition” she becomes overwrought. John told the narrator to not think of her condition but it would be a good thing because she can think of what she wants to do for herself. Instead, she is assigned to a place she does not want to be.

As she stays at the nursery where John makes her stay, it worsens. When she asked John to change the wallpaper in the room he wouldn’t. The wallpaper makes her feel crazy and she is stuck in her prison-like room. Lastly, she’s put into a mental hospital and she is going crazy over the course of time, she thought the room was for a baby but it was made for insane people. Her husband John is a doctor but he makes her condition worse another ironic fact.

The Yellow Wallpaper tells about the narrator’s husband, John, who has rented a house in us for the summer while his spouse recovers from brief frightened despair shortly after the birth of their baby. The narrator decides to hold a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that regularly intensifies into obsession, and completely identifies herself with the female imprisoned in the wallpaper. Now absolutely recognized as the lady in the wallpaper, spends her time crawling on all fours around the room, her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, properly over his fallen body. John comes domestic and begins to bang on the bedroom door calling for an ax to destroy it, Jane tells him the place the key when he ultimately opens the door he begins crying out at what he finds. Jane informs him it’s she is getting out of the wallpaper eventually in spite of him and she has pulled off most of the wallpaper. So, he can not put her back. She creeps around the room and over John’s physique after he faints. This essay represents the power relation between husband and wife.

Jane, she is the protagonist in the story. ‘Nobody would consider what an effort it is to do what little I am able,- to dress and entertain and different things. Even even though Jane faced herself with a hard mental illness, she nevertheless tried to do everyday things. Even though Jane already felt that having mental illness used to be not easy, she nonetheless did something to help others and seemed like she was once fine. On this side, we can be aware that Jane feels tired constantly indicating that she is quality even though she feels that she is so messed up, especially with the condition of the human beings around her who do not apprehend what she feels.

The protagonist’s purpose in the story, she desires free life. ‘ But I ought to say what I experience and assume in some way it is such a relief! ‘. Jane wants life without isolation before she moved to the other city with her husband, John. Therefore, write her story so that she can share her feelings. In his fight against intellectual illness, she hopes that human beings do now not minimize mental sickness and can include the man or woman with mental sickness the usage of a top way so that person will get better condition. ‘But the effort is getting to be greater than the remedy ‘. This passage shows that in order to get the opportunity to categorical what he feels, get the possibility to be heard by different humans, and get space for expression is extra effort than he gets remedy in his heart. Because it is very hard to get a house and a chance to expression for him.

John is the antagonist personality in the story, which we can see in this passage. ‘ I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such incredibly old-fashioned chintz hangtings! But John would no longer hear of it. Jane instructed John about her pain with the new room she and her husband would occupy. Moreover, she asked for some other room to be occupied, but John did not desire to hear it. John has an egocentric character, he is aware of his spouse’s experience uncomfortable with their new room. Moreover, he passes it out of his own interest. He does not prioritize his wife’s comfort, however, he prioritizes his feelings, even though his spouse desires that remedy more.

The difficulty of power relation can be considered from Jane having a limited lifestyle with the aid of John, due to the fact John feels that he has the power to restrict his wife’s life. The use of direct speech suggests the electricity relation. Jane, who has an intellectual illness, needs to trip existence on the outside. However, her husband, John forbids her to go anywhere. John forbids it by way of using the excuse that Jane is in a proper condition to go anywhere that makes Jane stay in the house. ‘But he stated I wasn’t in a position to go, nor able to stand it after I got there and I did now not make out a very suitable case for myself, for I was once crying before I had finished ‘. This narration style indicates, Through the prohibition that John uttered to his wife, Jane in this case John wanted to show that he had extra electricity to control his wife’s life. He does not care about how his wife feels, due to the fact what he prioritizes is the view of others that he is anyone who has power.

Foucault.M. (1982) described that strength members of the family are rooted in people’s lives so it is very challenging to change, they desire to exhibit to each other that they are anyone who has superb power. Even even though there will be an elimination of energy relations, such as energy members of the family between genders, it will still be sustainable in people’s lives. Moreover, in accordance with the quote from Michel Foucault above, it capability that equality between gender will be difficult to attain considering the strength fact of the machine that has been formed for a lengthy time

That is, power family members are rooted in social relations, not returning above society as the complementary structure that radical abolition would possibly dream up. , To stay in society skill to stay in such a way that action on different moves is possible and in fact sustainable. A society barring strong family members can solely be an abstraction. This passage indicates that strong members of the family are rooted in people’s lives so it is very tough to change, they choose to exhibit each other that they are any individual who has incredible power. Even though there will be a removal of power relations, such as energy between members of the family between genders, it will nonetheless be sustainable in people’s lives. Moreover, according to the quote from Michel Foucault above, it skills that equality between gender will be challenging to attain by thinking about the electricity actuality of the device that has been fashioned for a long time.

now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.” (Stetson 653). This shows that the narrator has truly lost her sanity with her obsession with the wallpaper due to being the only thing besides her.

However, not only did the narrator’s emotions change, but she also created an unrealistic “human” relationship with the wallpaper. Since she was always alone, the wallpaper was the only object she had to make connections with. For example, when the narrator says, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” (Stetson 649), the wallpaper develops human characteristics based on what the narrator believes she sees. Such examples are when she mentions that the wallpaper has “eyes” staring back and has a “broken neck” or “and it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Stetson 652). By this point, the narrator starts to see a person behind the wallpaper in which she thinks she is not alone. Towards the end, she confirms that there is someone behind the wallpaper trying to escape just like herself, such as when she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” (Stetson 652). This shows that the loneliness made her develop a relationship with a non-human object.

In addition, the narrator’s fluctuating emotions and unrealistic relationship with the wallpaper help her escape from the reality of being isolated from society. Since she is alone, she creates her own world in her mind to help her ease the time in the room. Her emotions and connections with the wallpaper make her believe that no one else will understand her such as the wallpaper does as she states, ‘There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.’ (Stetson 652). Besides that, her life now revolves around the wallpaper, and is no longer bored. As she says, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better and am more quiet than I was.” (Stetson 653). At the end of the story, the narrator says, “I’ve got out at last,’ said I, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can’t put me back!” (Stetson 656). She believes that the woman in the wallpaper was in fact herself. Now that the whole wallpaper is stripped off this demonstrates that she has gone insane and believes she has truly escaped from reality.

In the whole story, readers are skeptical of the narrator’s own mental health. When the narrator writes in her journal, she describes different emotions and events that she thinks are happening to her. Her mental constraints worsen her situation. Her distorted illusions created an unrealistic reality that she has been confined to while imprisoned in the room. This creates a sense of unreliability based on her fluctuating emotions, the unrealistic “human” relationship with the wallpaper, and her mental escape from reality.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ takes a gander at the unforgiving thought of sex occupations as they have been compelled on young women in the past due nineteenth century. The storyteller is made wild-eyed by her inability to express her character.

The Yellow Wallpaper is made as a solicitation out of journal areas from the perspective of a young woman who is tormented by post-pregnancy tension. The storyteller begins by depicting the tremendous, beautifying home that she and her significant other, John, have rented for the pre-summer. John is a sensible man, a specialist, and their transform into the US is to a constrained degree enabled by techniques for his choice to reveal his suffering life partner to its unblemished air and calm lifestyles all together that she will in all likelihood recover from what he sees as a slight disturbance The storyteller whimpers that her significant other will never again center around her issues about her condition, and treats her like a tyke. She moreover presumes that there may be something odd and abnormal around the house, which has been unfilled for quite a while, anyway, John rejects her issues as an imbecilic dream. As an element of her fix, the storyteller is unthinkable from looking for any interest next to private work, altogether never again to evaluate her mind. She explicitly misses the insightful exhibition of creating and verbal exchange, and this record is written in a diary that she gets away from her significant other. They stream into the room at the most elevated purpose of the living course of action, which the storyteller expect is a past nursery since it has prohibited windows and stripping yellow scenery. This enemies of operator yellow setting transforms into a vital focus in the story, in light of the way that the storyteller progresses toward becoming focused on interpreting its clearly inconceivable, preposterous styles. She keeps covering the diary from John and grows logically progressively satisfied that the set contains a deceptive weight that bargains the all-out family unit. From her room, she will very likely watch a shaded way, the sound, and a clogged porch nursery. When she will get away from the eye of her significant other and Jennie, his sister, she keeps up her look at the setting and starts off cutting edge to expect she can see a baffling isolated concealing at the back of the best precedent. She attempts to impact her better half that they ought to pull back the house, anyway, he requests that she is overhauling and sees humoring her stresses as engaging a dangerous, impossible nature, while what’s required is the nature of the cerebrum. The storyteller’s hopelessness and shortcoming keep decaying. Her enthusiasm for the scenery expects authority over her world. In a movement of continuously quick diary segments, she depicts her headway in uncovering the riddles and methodologies of its model, as she grows an extending number of paranoids about the objectives of Jennie and John. She believes that the choice is a creeping female, got at the back of the bars of the best model, and will finish up setting out to free her, and to keep up the name of the round of her lifestyles from her significant other and his sister. She astounds Jennie separating a scratched sorrow at the divider and doesn’t trust in her reason that she had been looking out the wellspring of the yellow stains on the storyteller’s bits of apparel. She starts off created to spare secrets and strategies even from her diary and makes a starter, evening time tries to push off the scenery at the eve of their departure. A short time later, while every one of the decorations has been shed from the room other than for the bit and overpowering bed stand, she jolts the portal and hurls the key down onto the front power, after which keeps on tearing and tearing at the bits of the setting she will reach. Here, at the story’s pinnacle, the attitude moves as the storyteller’s insightful breakdown will finish up entire, and in her frenzy, she is satisfied that she is the woman who advanced toward getting to be captured behind the scenery. She starts off created to sneak around the room in an unending circle, spreading the background in a true groove. John breaks into the room and discovers her, and blacks out on the sight. She keeps to creep always over the room, compelled to move over his organized edge.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had an outrageous early life after her father left her very own family. She was imagined on the third of July 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut to Mary Perkins and Frederic Beecher Perkins. She had simply kinfolk, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months more settled than her. Her aunts, nearby outstanding suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, upheld her mother through this period. In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson and offered to begin their single infant, a young lady. After the transport of her daughter, she encountered post-birth tension and was embraced an incapable loosening up fix by using Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who guided that she appreciates the family unit responsibilities and keeps away from insightful development. She was confined from her better half in 1888 and moved to Pasadena, California, and transformed into an enthusiastic voice inside the ladies’ dissident advancement, appropriating comprehensively the chosen form of employment of women inside the family. She ended up married again in 1900, to her first cousin Houghton Gilman. In 1932 she ended up apparent with chest-threatening development and, in 1935, she finished everything on August 17, 1935, including techniques for taking an overdose of chloroform, which she considered as most appealing to loss of life with the guide of sickness.

The yellow setting indisputably addresses the subject of chance and limitation as the main reason for Gender. As the expectation in the storyteller’s constrainment is her sexual introduction. This besides makes an invigorating way out of self-finishing denied to the storyteller. The storyteller portrays making unquestionably inside the story, believing that it will encourage her distress. The story and message of The Yellow Wallpaper are built up in an unquestionable class and social dynamic. The storyteller’s a person from the best class; she and her life partner are rich sufficient to take a mid-year off and have employees supply each need.

The oppression of women in the patriarchal society of the late nineteenth century is well established in the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The uncoincidentally unnamed protagonist, a wife of a physician, suffers presumably from postpartum depression. Women’s mental health was not given much, if any, study or consideration, and treatments were often unsatisfactory and nearly absurd. Her sanity slowly dissolves in an obsession with torn wallpaper in their bedroom and the figure of what she is sure to be a woman.

As she occupies more and more of her time in the room, her only stimuli become the wallpaper; a fixed, enclosed flat space. Her autonomy as a woman and a wife are nonexistent, which correlates to her immediate surroundings as they are the opposite of freedom and leisure: the windows are barred, the heavy bed nailed down, the floor gouged, the wallpaper deteriorating, and a locked gate. The narrative consists only of two contrasting visual frames: the window, where she longingly gazes out at the lovely views of a “delicious” (581) green garden and a neighboring bay, which epitomizes life and openness, and the “atrocious” (582) solitary room that she is seemingly trapped in. The nursery-turned bedroom symbolizes the entrapment of domesticity and mental health that many women often experienced in this time period.

The rising action of the plot mimics the increasing loss of the narrator’s sanity in her attempts to find meaning and reason within the wallpaper. Gilman uses visual references to embellish the climax and expose the underlinings of the main character. The descriptions of the wallpaper give a peculiar and growing density to the narrator; she describes the wallpaper as an “optic horror” (585) that has a pattern that looks “like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (582), curves that “suddenly commit suicide” (583), while also comparing it to sprouting fungus and seaweed. She was determined to “follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion,” (584) which was later revealed to be “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (586).

Gilman created a verbal expression that employed techniques originating from abstraction and cubist art, which practice the limited use of color as well as featuring other visual elements. The color yellow, often times associated with happiness, ironically, forces the narrator to study the confusing contours of the peeling paper. The wife begins a fascination after her initial disgust with the broken patterns and as she finds herself growing attached to them, it pushes her deeper into her anxieties by overwhelming her visually. She becomes “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper” (584).

As she mentally and physically inclines closer to the wallpaper, even circling the room so much as to cause stains on her clothing, the reader senses a growing paranoia in her narration; it becomes a “great effort for [her] to think straight” (585). The narrator is forced to search for forms of design and see in two dimensions, submitting to the invasive paper and hallucinating a creeping, skulking figure that is quietly subdued in the daytime; eerily much as the narrator is. The figure of a woman inside the paper is quite literally a shadow of the wife; a hidden personification of the imprisonment and confinement of women.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a narrative-based examination of the progression of a physically and mentally repressed subject whose mind becomes increasingly less dependent on external stimuli. Gilman combines both text and image to depict emotional disturbance. Her projection of emotions onto the wallpaper allows the reader to experience an erratic, and eventually frenzy, transition from sane to insane.