Short stories go down like ice cream, but they often leave the reader with lingering sensations. What are those sensations? What do they have to do with your experience? Is "Literature" with a capital L a more effective brand of cultural meaning-making than commercials, Twitter, or the news?
Hopefully, we'll get the ball rolling on some of these questions. Featured texts describe utopian visions, bovine rebellion, freezing to death, and school shootings (among other things).
Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was very interesting to me and sort of hard to understand until I read back over it. But basically it is a journal of a women suffering from nervous depression who is staying at a summer house with her husband and a nurse. I think this story is written in a time period where women had no say in much and their thoughts weren’t heard because her husband would never stop to listen to what she had to say because he was the physician and he knew what was going on already. He tried to keep the narrator from doing much of anything like writing or imagining which ultimately led to her craziness in the end. She had nothing to do but stare at the yellow wallpaper. She was around this wallpaper so often that she believed she saw a women behind bars in the wallpaper. She sought to figure out the wallpaper and how to free this women who was apparently trapped. She would watch the women creep during the day and shake the bars at night trying to get out. Because her insanity grew, the moment she was alone, she peeled off most of the paper to free the women. Eventually, the narrator believed that she had come from the wallpaper as well. Then she began to creep around crawling about the room like the women she saw in the wallpaper because she saw herself as the trapped woman. She locked herself in the room towards the end of the story and once her husband knocked the door down, he realized he was wrong as he saw the mess and his wife’s actions of creeping about. The fact that she told him that she ripped the paper so neither he or Jane could stick her back into the paper, made her husband faint. Not only did she mention Jane, a person who doesn’t exist, but she wasn’t concerned about her husband fainting, she just continued to creep around the room and walk or crawl over him each time as if nothing happened. This just proved she was completely insane at the end of the story or maybe she was insane the entire time but her husband didn't spend enough time thoroughly evaluating her. If that was the case, then her husband was the reason why she got to the point of pure insanity that can't be helped because he let it progress without getting the input of not only his wife, but his patient.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very neat short story. I really was not expecting things to turn out the way they did. After reading the first few pages I assumed that the house was haunted and that the faces she was seeing within the wallpaper were spirits. Didn't the last few pages throw that assumption out the window! It turns out that the main character actually convinced herself that she herself was the one behind the wallpaper and the "bars" that she was seeing within the pattern were actually restricting her. The main character suffered from depression as well as suppression and the fact that she is forced to remain confined to her room and stare at this, in her opinion, god awful wallpaper, just causes her to become more upset. This is until, she begins to become obsessively engaged in its patterns and the "woman" she shes behind it. The mini summery of the author that is on top of the hard copy of the paper I have says that the author was a feminist and eventually committed suicide. I thought for a little bit that the author was going to have the main character commit suicide as well. Regardless, I feel as if the wallpaper symbolizes the form of oppression she felt as a woman. By her actually being the woman locked behind the bars in the wallpaper demonstrated the feelings that she had while living with her husband who pretty much controlled her life. Although she seemed to love him, his care, concern, and rules were too restricting for her and that causes her to "lock" him out her little space which is the place hidden away from him..aka behind the yellow wallpaper.
Relationships a century ago compared to present day have changed dramatically. Now, women frequently work and have say in their relationship. This story reminded me that back in the day, men controlled their relationship. John controls his wife. She does not work and is bored out of her mind sitting at home all day which causes her anxiety. She sleeps during the day to pass it by instead of doing something productive. He does not let her out of the house and denies her request to visit her family members. The fact that makes this relationship even worse is that the wife thinks her husband is good for her. She always says how John loves her, cares about her and takes care of her. This may be true, but he is completely taking away her independence. He also strikes her, a manifestation of his control. I think the yellow wallpaper is a symbol of John’s control over his wife. She begs him to take it down but he will not and insists it is better for her to leave it up. The wallpaper drives her insane and she hates it just like John, even if it takes her a little bit of time to realize this. The wallpaper will not go away as John’s control will not. When the wife finally tears the wallpaper down with her own strength, she declares that she ‘has got out at last’. The repression leading to boredom and depression was finally destroyed.
The short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ written by Gilman is weird. The narrator is depressed after having this baby and the family plus a nurse are living in this house for three months. The narrator journals which is basically this entire story. I blame her stupid controlling husband for most of her insaneness. She probably wouldn’t have gone insane if she was allowed to journal, talk, or express her feelings in any way! Clearly the girl in yellow paper was the narrator’s hallucination of the way she viewed herself; trapped behind bars. I find in ironic the color yellow is used. It’s describing this woman crawling behind bars trying to escape during the night. However, when I see yellow I think of something happy or a happy mood. Black or gray would be more appropriate for this wall because it’s showing what this woman feels. The ending was pretty messed up. I thought she was going to kill herself. But since she pulled off all the ‘bars’ on the wall she thought she escaped her husband and this house she hated. She says, “…And I’ve pulled off most the paper, so you can’t put me back!” I’m thinking she’s developing schizophrenia because the woman crawling on the wall is a hallucination. This passage was also ironic in the sense of taking something so plain and boring, such as a wall, and making an entire story about a wall. I think a theme in this story is showing what can happen to you if you don’t express your feelings.
In the story “The Yellow wallpaper” I thought it to be very odd and almost insane like. I could not tell if Jenny was John’s wife, daughter, or insane patient that he was working on. It was very odd indeed, the story went on and talked about how Jenny was obsessing over this yellow wall paper talking about it over and over again and pointing out all the little details in it, it was as if she was watching paint dry! It also talks about how John is a physician as if he is trying to treat his insane wife/daughter patient in a very odd way. He kept telling her that she was wrong all the time basically and saying that she needed rest. He did not really let her do a lot and did not let her get what she wanted. For example Jennie wanted a bedroom downstairs but for some reason John did not want her going downstairs. It was almost as if Jennie was a prisoner in this yellow wallpaper room. Jennie does describe the room as having bars on the window and she also makes it sound like the house is haunted by a ghost of some sort. A women creeping around during the day time that she can see out of every window she looks out of. I just find his story to be particularly odd and kind of creepy because of the way Jennie was so obsessed about this yellow wallpaper and talking about there was this shadow women inside the wall paper creeping around all the time. Very odd.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was very interesting to me. I really like the way it was written, it seemed like a journal. Not much seemed to happen in the story but I really enjoyed it. I believe that the narrator had something going on with her more than what John had said. This woman seemed to have many problems psychologically. Putting her in this room definitely did not help her cause and you can see this as the story progresses. She starts to see into the yellow wallpaper and it possesses her. She starts to see a woman within the wallpaper, I believe this woman is herself and as she starts to see more clearly what is in the wallpaper she becomes more apart of it. She sees the woman in the wallpaper shaking the bars trying to escape. She tries to free her by removing the paper, like she is freeing herself from her mental prison in a way. At the end of the story I believe that she kills herself by hanging with the rope and that is why John faints. She does this because she is mentally unstable and she finally does what she wants by not doing what John wants. After this she fully becomes the woman in the wall and never has to do as she is told and “creeps around” all she wants for as long as she wants.
In the reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is told by a woman who is mentally ill and lives with her husband, John, in a rental house. Throughout the story, the character describes and implies that her husband has complete control over all her actions and provides her with medications. He forbids her from things that she enjoys, such as writing or going outside, just to make her stay in the house because she is “not better.” She describes that the house is beautiful, yet has a ghostly feeling and “there is something strange about the house.” When the couple moved into the house, their bedroom was on the second level in a crappy room with the wallpaper peeling off and a yellowing color. Because the house was vacant for a while, the house overall in rundown. The wallpaper that is above her bed is constantly peeling. The peeling wallpaper grabbed the main characters attention as she describes its patterns and yellowing color. It made her happy and always paid attention to “the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it;” it constantly hangs over her as it peels off. As it proceeds to the end, I believe that she was starting to see herself through the wallpaper because she would describe that she would always see this woman. At the end she tries to catch the woman with a rope. I think that she is going completely crazy.
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was definitely confusing. The narrator is taken to a house out in the middle of nowhere with her husband, newborn child and nurse. She is taken there for a few months because she has an illness and they want to treat it. They do it by having her sleep all the time. This only makes it worse because she’s just lying around all day and writing in her diary about what’s going on. She’s also very fascinated by this yellow wallpaper in her room, which is half of the reason why she goes completely insane at the end of the book. She keeps saying she sees bodies behind the wallpaper, as if John stores them back there. She tries to rip it and gets it all off. She then tells John that she ripped it all out and “you can’t put me back!” Maybe, in her mind, the wallpaper is a metaphor, meaning that he is trapping her in her room all the time, forcing her to sleep, like the “bodies” she sees are trapped behind the wallpaper. Or maybe she’s just nuts. I found it ironic that the thing that the one thing that was supposed to help her get better made her even worse (sleep). Just by the tone of the story, I could tell something was up by the end and that she might have lost it. And finally, she maybe could’ve freaked out because she didn’t like the color. I know different colors cause different emotions in people, so maybe she has something in her past that we don’t know about that is associated with the color yellow. But it was an interesting read to say the least.
"the yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman starts of by the narrator moving into a nice new summer home that she question show they afford. To me her not knowing how they afford it either shows to her condition, or the fact that it is an earlier time where the husband handled all the money. The narrator moves to the home with a newborn, nurse, and husband. Her husband is also her doctor. I think this is just absolutely the worse idea ever. The narrator's condition requires sleep but the lack of activity actually makes her worse. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and the wallpaper becomes the straw that broke her. I think that the nervous depression was caused by her oppression. the oppression is represented by the old yellowing paper. she finally goes absolutely crazy, causes her husband to faint, and crawls around in the wallpaper world inside of her head.
The story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilmans was a weird one, but what story do we read that is actually considered normal? Anyways, the story is told through the perspective of a mentally unstable woman. She recently had a child and is living in a rental home with her husband John. When she moves into the rental house, her life becomes consumed by this yellow wallpaper that is in her bedroom. She constantly sees a woman figure struggling to escape these "bars" as she calls them. As the story goes on, the main character becomes obsessed with the wall paper. I believe that the main character is seeing herself in this wallpaper. The woman figure who is trying to get out is actually her, trying to help herself and escape this mindset that she has been stuck in. She is aware that there is something wrong with her but no one else will believe her or even test her theory about being mentally unstable. She becomes so involved with trying to discover what is going on within this wallpaper that she believes getting a rope will help her catch this woman in the wallpaper. It's hard to understand what she is thinking exactly because to me, it just seems as if this lady is losing her mind and is so lonely and desperate for some sort of attention that she has become infatuated with this yellow wallpaper.
The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charolotte Perkins Gilman, shows how much the idea of marriage has changed. In this story, its distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male ensured that women remained second-class citizens. This was the ideal attitude and socially normal thing to do during the 19th century. Woman had no real rights or say in anything. This story really shows how much progress women have made; we can now work the same jobs as men and even have say in decisions, even in government. In the story when the women told her husband she is sick he tells her to not do anything physical and to just stay in bed. He didn’t even allow her to write in her journal. So instead of standing up for herself she had to hide her journal. She couldn’t argue with her husband and even complains again about John’s patronizing, controlling ways. I’m glad that women can now stand up for themselves and are not controlled by their husbands. No one deserves to feel trapped or controlled. The women looked for an escape from behind the main pattern of the wallpaper she is so fixated on, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. The hideous paper is a symbol of the domestic life that traps women, more in the 19th century then now, but it still happens in todays society.
While reading The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the aspects of the story that stood out to me was that the story line seemed a lot like modern horror films. How she was apprehensive about the house that they were staying at from the beginning and how she thought that something just wasn’t right, and just the way that she describes the room that she was staying in, how it had creepy ripped and peeling wallpaper, the barred windows, and the gate at the top of the stairs. It seemed as though from the beginning of the story that it wasn’t going to end well for this woman. As the story went on and she began to talk about the woman that she keeps seeing behind the wallpaper, it seems as though she her condition keeps getting worse and worse as she begins to see the woman more and more often. Because of this, I thought that the main focus of this story was simply the declining mental health of this woman and how it ended up leading to her death, I think that she killed herself at the end of the story. The other aspect of the story that I found rather interesting was the irony in how she was taken to the house to try and help her get better, but it was actually the house that caused her to go crazy. I thought that that was similar to what happened in Story of an Hour, how hearing that her husband was alive actually killed her, not hearing that he was dead. Overall, I thought that this story was very interesting even though I do not like horror movies. I also found it a little confusing in places, especially the end as the author doesn’t make it clear what actually happened to her.
In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was again very strange and a little bit confusing. This poor woman thought she was sick, but her husband and her brother who were both physicians agreed with each other on the fact that she was not sick. She spent her whole summer in a rental vacation house in a room that seemed eerie and creepy. Her husband stayed with her most of the time, but wouldn’t let her move into a room on the first floor that was more inviting and cozy. The woman was upset that she was not able to move into a different room. In my opinion, the room that she was staying in throughout the whole story was almost like a room found in an insane asylum. I also think that her husband knew she was crazy and not right in the head. The part that was strange and confusing is when she started describing how she saw shadows in her room and she thought that they were stuck in the wall. She thought they were trapped and were trying to escape. A critical detail was that the woman also saw bars on the wall almost like the wall was trying to keep something inside. At the end of the story I did not understand what happened to her. I thought that the shadows in the wall were spirits and in the end, they broke out of the wall and possessed her. In the end I think she just went crazy ripping all of the wallpaper off and she was the spirit inside the wall.
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a very interesting story. After reading a bit of the story, I thought it was going to be not quite as it turned out to be after actually finishing to story. I found the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper very important. I believe that the yellow wallpaper symbolized herself and all woman in that time period to be almost caged in my their husbands, as they had no say and their own opinions were rarely heard. The main character struggles with depression, and her husband tries to help her by making to her stay in a room with yellow wallpaper. At first, she hates the wall paper and after a while she begin to see shapes and soon after realizes a woman is trapped behind bars in the wall paper. She then enjoys starring at the wallpaper, and soon realizes that she needs to let the woman escape. I think that the woman stuck behind the wall paper, is a representation of herself and she feels as if she is stuck behind this wall paper and to be let free she had to realize this and tear the wallpaper down. I think that a lot of woman in this time did not have a whole lot of say and she was therefore feeling very depressed. The author also mentioned something about them have a baby, and that made me wonder if she was actually suffering the baby blues. Either way, in the end, her husband helped her get better and she escaped from behind the yellow wallpaper. Overall, I enjoyed this story and liked that there was a true significance behind the yellow wallpaper.
“The Yellow Wallpaper”, takes us into the life of a very ill woman who is so trapped in her own life that she can’t separate fantasy from reality. She moves into what seems to be a haunted house, to escape her problems but it only worsens her condition. She begins to see a woman trapped in the wallpaper and is determined to try to free this person. I believe that the vision of this woman trapped is her mind portraying her life to her, because she is trapped in her marriage. Her husband is very controlling and treats her like a little girl throughout the whole story. When the woman is finally freed from the wallpaper, I believe it symbolizes her finally taking control of her life.
The “ The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a women with some sort of mental disorder such as depression or an anxiety disorder. I don’t like that her husband is controlling her at every moment. Even though John is a doctor, he isn’t even able to treat his wife properly. I find it strange that she is not told by John or a physician her diagnosis. She is just told they she is “unwell” and not properly. If she is aware of the problem and not controlled by John, perhaps she can get well sooner. Certain points it seems as if John is sabotaging is her recovery because he unwilling to even listen to her suggestion. This short story also reminded me of the past when women’s were being controlled by their husbands or men and not considered independent of smart enough to think for themselves. John basically controls all aspects of her life, she is not even allowed to write or sleep as she pleases. I feel fortunate enough to be a women in United States where we have relativity same rule between the genders and a chance to have proper education. It’s unfortunate, that there are still some cultures and countries where men are supreme and women aren’t allowed an education or make their own life choices.
“The Yellow Wallpaper “ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a strange and kind of confusing story. It starts out with a couple going to a new place which is intended to help the narrator’s current health condition. However we soon find that it only does the opposite. She seems to have a mental disorder of some sort and although her husband is a doctor, he claims that she is fine and healthy. While arriving at the house the narrator gets strange feelings and soon becomes fearful of the wallpaper in one of the rooms. As they described the room I got the feeling that it could be related to some sort of psychiatric hospital with the barred windows and torn wallpaper and everything else. As the narrator resides in this room, she soon becomes fixed on the wallpaper and begins to see women within it, trying to escape. At the end of the story she reveals that she has been creeping around and shaking the bars to release the women which I believe is herself. I think she has convinced herself that she is from the wallpaper and she is trying to release herself from that room, and from the control of her husband. The control of her husband also plays a big role in this story. Being a doctor, her husband claims that the room is helping her condition and that she is getting better. However, there is clearly something mentally wrong with her and the wallpaper is not helping her recover. She always obeys her husband and never questions him. I believe that if she fought for what she wanted, like switching rooms for example, there would have been a different effect on her. It seems like her husband was trying to control everything she did and many aspects of her life.
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was confusing to me at first, but by the end of the story I believe to have grasped what was occurring. It all begins with a couple, a woman who seems to not have a job, and her husband who is a physician. The Husband is extremely controlling, and even when she says that something is wrong with her he tells her that she is fine and that she shouldn't worry about it. Being a physician you would think that he would take the time to care of his wife but he does the opposite, he takes her to a house for a few weeks to help her current health, but this house shows to put even more stress on the woman. The woman complains constantly about the wallpaper that is in their bedroom, she tells the husband how it has an awful pattern, and that it smells, and she even describes how there is a woman behind the wallpaper moving it and creeping around the house. The husband simply brushes off what she says and tells her that she is doing fine and that she's starting to look better. The last scene of this story describes how the woman tore down all the wallpaper one day while her husband was away, in search of the woman that is behind it. I believe that after reading this that the wallpaper is a symbol for what is going on in the woman's life. I feel that when she looks at the wallpaper and sees a terrible pattern and how awful it looks and smells, she's actually looking at herself, and how she is scared to stand up for herself as her husband is controlling her. I believe that she wants to tear down the wallpaper to find the woman behind it because that shows she wants to change her life and stand up for herself and take control of her own life.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman involves a woman with a mental illness and her husband, a physician. The married people are living in a rented place that has this certain yellow wallpaper. The woman becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and starts to analyze the wallpaper’s patterns. She notices the patterns on the wallpaper are moving and there is a women confined in the wallpaper. But her husband would not understand the things she sees because he believes there is nothing wrong with her. However, she has to have some kind of mental illness because people don’t have these reactions to wallpapers. I think her husband decided to ignore her pleas and warnings that she was sick. Instead, he tried to confine her by limiting what she could do, telling her everything was fine, and making her rest more. But throughout the story I started to think of two different perspectives of what the woman was going through. I thought that the yellow wallpaper situation was a sign that her mental illness was progressing. Her illness was getting worse because she was not receiving proper care for the illness. However, I also thought that the yellow wallpaper situation symbolized confinement. She wasn't allowed to go outside, visit relatives, or do many things she enjoyed. Her husband took away many of her freedoms and all that was left of her was a lifeless person. She became the women who started to sleep throughout the day and couldn't even think for herself. But as she explained this woman in the wallpaper, it seemed like she was talking about herself. She said the woman was confined by the bars, similar to her confinement within the house. When she tore the wallpaper down she was no longer stuck, and her husband no longer controlled her.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a confusing but interesting story once I understood it. The story is about a woman with a mental illness. She and her husband go to a mansion to live there and the woman becomes fixated on a certain wallpaper in the room. Her husband is a doctor and believes there is nothing wrong with his wife and is controlling of her. The woman keeps a journal to help her even though her husband does not approve of it. As the woman continues to become fixated with the yellow wallpaper she start to see things within in. She sees a woman trying to escape and attempts to help the woman. From the beginning, I thought the woman trying to escape symbolized the narrator. The narrator is trying is escape from her husband and his controlling nature. Though the narrator is fixated on the wallpaper she does sometimes mention her husband and how she doesn't like his controlling ways but does not know how to escape. She sees herself as the yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is stuck in the room just like her and cannot escape. When the narrator finally tore down the wallpaper, I believe it symbolized her escaping from her husband's grasp. She was finally free.
As I read the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I could feel the suspense increasing in the plot as if it were a horror movie. In the story a woman that suffers from post-partum depression has just had a baby and she and her husband John are vacationing in a mansion for a couple weeks. This little get away is supposed to help the woman become more relaxed, stress-free and to somewhat heal and improve her condition. However, it turns out to do the complete opposite. Her husband thought of this to be a positive decision considering he is a doctor but in fact he doesn’t really understand his own wife’s condition and she doesn’t really explain to him what she goes through. He only believes that she is un- well and needs to spend time alone to get better. He makes sure this happens by having her enclosed in a bedroom upstairs of the mansion and does not let her roam the grounds. He is very controlling and expects her to obey him. She doesn’t think of it as a bad thing because she knows that he is loving, caring and only wants the best for her but at certain points it starts to become very bothersome. The room soon drives her insane. She feels trapped and unfocused. She immediately is annoyed with the odd yellow wallpaper in the room which is the only thing that really stands out since the house and room are barely furnished. Hallucinations soon attack her mind. As she strives for fresh air and freedom, she writes of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper in her journal. This journal contains all of her true feelings and emotions, something that she hides well from John. As the days passed, soon for their departure from the so called “vacation” she envisioned the woman behind the wallpaper, trapped, breaking free little by little. She even helped by scraping the wallpaper as well trying to help her. Near the end of the story when she is in the room her husband becomes panicked because she no longer has the desire to leave the room but has locked herself in it. When he gets the key and enters, he notices his wife crawling on the floor circling the room like a crazy person as if she were possessed (we could think) and he faints. She continues to do this even with John on the floor and the wallpaper is scraped, gone and the wall bare. Us as the readers can make the connection that the yellow wallpaper was an allegorical representation of what she is going through in her life. At the end the woman is free because the wallpaper cannot contain her anymore as well is she because it is time to go home.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a very good short story about a woman who is accused by her husband as being basically hysterical. Her husband, a physician, says that she needs to spend some time alone to get over her condition and be able to rejoin the community and her husband and past life. She is locked in a bedroom on the highest floor of the mansion her and her husband are vacationing in. The bedroom seems pretty normal, except that it has very strange wallpaper. At first, there is no problem for the woman in this room, but, as she spends more time alone with it, the wallpaper begins to drive her insane. She begins to see a woman "trapped" inside the wallpaper, and tries to free her. She spends her time tearing the wallpaper off of the wall to help her newly discovered friend that was trapped. By the end of the story, the woman's husband, John, gets the key and goes to check on his wife. When he opens the door, he finds her crawling around on the floor with the walls bare of the yellow wallpaper containing the woman that only his wife could see and resembled herself. Upon seeing this horrific sight, John faints, and his wife continues on as if he were never in the room. We can see the wallpaper as a symbol for the woman's condition, because she seemed to see herself in it as if it were a mirror, and she had to free herself from the confines of the wall.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was very interesting to me.The short story starts of by the narrator moving into a nice new summer home that she question show they afford. That just makes me feel as what state she is in or it was just one of those situations where her husband handles all the money. The narrator then starts to become obsessed with the wallpaper. I believe that was what pushed her over the edge. I also found it ironic that the one thing that was suppose to make her better, which was sleep, ended up making her even worse. What i was thinking that maybe some how the color yellow meant something to her and that something bad happened to her in the past that had to do with the color.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very strange story to read yet I found myself very intrigued by it. All the while the woman is thought to be getting better from her nervous depress it is truly getting worse and she is starting to imagine things in the wallpaper of the room she is in. She speaks of its movement and its strange shapes and color and how she can see a woman in it. I think this is her reflecting on her on life and realizing it is much like the pattern on the wallpaper; very complex and recently , very sufficicating and trapping. Her husband insists that she sleeps and remains quiete and composed even I'm this time of difficulty with the condition he does not believe she has and yet all she wants to do is break free and live as normally as possible to regain her mental health. In this way she becomes trapped like the woman behind bars in the wallpaper. Rattling trying to escape in the dark but maintaining calm and collected during the day when everyone is watching. Having experienced this she does appear more mentally instable than what was previously mentioned but in a way it gave her something to do to feel human and in a way sane. Feelings and emotions are what makes us human, seeing this lady in the wallpaper caused her to feel and analyze her own life while in a stressful situation therefore making her feel that she wasn't completely useless and that she needed to make a change. Yes, she did become a little obsessed and went a bit crazy, but she didn't conform to being who they expected her to be, quiete , composed, & "normal."
The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was an interesting read for me. The story is based on a women suffering from what I believed was severe depression, she had just delivered a baby, and her husband John and her moved into a new home. Throughout the story the readers gain a very clear and detailed understanding of her thoughts and how she is clearly struggling with something either mentally or medically. Unfortunately her husband doesn’t believe that anything is wrong with as he is a Physician, and supposedly would know if something was wrong with her. At this new house instead of helping her, it is making her become even more stressed, and she continuously complains about the wallpaper in their bedroom. Eventually one night while John was away she tarred down the wallpaper in search of a woman behind it. I felt in the beginning sorry for her husband, for not knowing how to help his wife, but towards the end I was frustrated with his inability to truly see that there is clearly something wrong with her. John was so controlling over his wife, I believe that the wallpaper was a symbol of how trapped, and unfulfilled she felt her life had become. The tearing of the wallpaper represented the change in her life she is now willing to make, by finally wanting to stand up for herself!
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very easy read and it kept my interest. When I first heard that we were reading this short story for class, I clearly remembered what this story was about although I don't remember actually reading it before. This story is about a woman who moved into a colonial mansion for the summer with her husband (a physician) who believed that this would be good for her and the recent state she has been in lately (even though he believes she is not sick, just nervous and hysterical). The way this woman describes this house gives the reader the sense that it there is something not right about this house and it could even possibly be haunted. This woman spends all of her time in the large bedroom on the highest floor of the house, and she notices how strange the wallpaper is. Not only was it hideous, there was something about the pattern that caught her interest. When she is alone in that room, she studies the wallpaper and says it is like there is "a woman stooping down and creeping out behind that pattern". This alone is enough to let the reader know that this woman is not in healthy state of mind. Or another possibility is that everyone around her -her husband and brother who are both physicians- has made her believe that she is just nervous and her mind is playing tricks on her, while they just might not want to believe anything that she sees. She tells the "paper" (as she writes in secret) things she would never bring up to her husband, knowing how he would react. The woman gets upset at Jennie when she catches her with her papers in her room, because she doesn't want anyone else to know of the woman in the wallpaper. This woman believes that she sees this figure creeping on her during the day from outside in the gardens and on the paths. The woman she sees creeping on her could just be her mind thinking that this is true, as a parallel to what she wants, which is to escape her "prison".
I think that this was a very powerful story. This woman was trapped from the beginning first by her husband, then by her frustrations and anxieties. Her husband never took her seriously. This was a major problem because she needed an escape. She was very overwhelmed and had no one to talk to which is why she created these women in the wall. They talked to her they were there for her when no one else was. In the end she got to escape. It was not in the way she wanted, but she escaped the cage that everyone else trapped her in.
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very good story. This is about a woman who needed help from her husband and she never got it. In this story there is a woman who is suffering from nervous depression. The doctor that is treating her also happens to be her husband. Her husband bought a house for them to move into for the summer. This was a very nice big house. Her husband tells her that she is not allowed to do much physical activity and no reading or writing. This was causing the narrator to go even more insane. After a little while she secretly gets a journal and starts writing in it. After being so lonely and bored she starts to get a fixation on the wallpaper in her room. After observing it for a while she begins to go crazy with it and believes that there is a woman behind the wallpaper trying to get out. She related it to herself and said that she was the one trying to get out. I believe this was all put on the husband. If the husband let her have more freedom and spent more time with her that probably would have been the best treatment.
ReplyDeleteGilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was very interesting to me and sort of hard to understand until I read back over it. But basically it is a journal of a women suffering from nervous depression who is staying at a summer house with her husband and a nurse. I think this story is written in a time period where women had no say in much and their thoughts weren’t heard because her husband would never stop to listen to what she had to say because he was the physician and he knew what was going on already. He tried to keep the narrator from doing much of anything like writing or imagining which ultimately led to her craziness in the end. She had nothing to do but stare at the yellow wallpaper. She was around this wallpaper so often that she believed she saw a women behind bars in the wallpaper. She sought to figure out the wallpaper and how to free this women who was apparently trapped. She would watch the women creep during the day and shake the bars at night trying to get out. Because her insanity grew, the moment she was alone, she peeled off most of the paper to free the women. Eventually, the narrator believed that she had come from the wallpaper as well. Then she began to creep around crawling about the room like the women she saw in the wallpaper because she saw herself as the trapped woman. She locked herself in the room towards the end of the story and once her husband knocked the door down, he realized he was wrong as he saw the mess and his wife’s actions of creeping about. The fact that she told him that she ripped the paper so neither he or Jane could stick her back into the paper, made her husband faint. Not only did she mention Jane, a person who doesn’t exist, but she wasn’t concerned about her husband fainting, she just continued to creep around the room and walk or crawl over him each time as if nothing happened. This just proved she was completely insane at the end of the story or maybe she was insane the entire time but her husband didn't spend enough time thoroughly evaluating her. If that was the case, then her husband was the reason why she got to the point of pure insanity that can't be helped because he let it progress without getting the input of not only his wife, but his patient.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very neat short story. I really was not expecting things to turn out the way they did. After reading the first few pages I assumed that the house was haunted and that the faces she was seeing within the wallpaper were spirits. Didn't the last few pages throw that assumption out the window! It turns out that the main character actually convinced herself that she herself was the one behind the wallpaper and the "bars" that she was seeing within the pattern were actually restricting her. The main character suffered from depression as well as suppression and the fact that she is forced to remain confined to her room and stare at this, in her opinion, god awful wallpaper, just causes her to become more upset. This is until, she begins to become obsessively engaged in its patterns and the "woman" she shes behind it. The mini summery of the author that is on top of the hard copy of the paper I have says that the author was a feminist and eventually committed suicide. I thought for a little bit that the author was going to have the main character commit suicide as well. Regardless, I feel as if the wallpaper symbolizes the form of oppression she felt as a woman. By her actually being the woman locked behind the bars in the wallpaper demonstrated the feelings that she had while living with her husband who pretty much controlled her life. Although she seemed to love him, his care, concern, and rules were too restricting for her and that causes her to "lock" him out her little space which is the place hidden away from him..aka behind the yellow wallpaper.
ReplyDeleteRelationships a century ago compared to present day have changed dramatically. Now, women frequently work and have say in their relationship. This story reminded me that back in the day, men controlled their relationship. John controls his wife. She does not work and is bored out of her mind sitting at home all day which causes her anxiety. She sleeps during the day to pass it by instead of doing something productive. He does not let her out of the house and denies her request to visit her family members. The fact that makes this relationship even worse is that the wife thinks her husband is good for her. She always says how John loves her, cares about her and takes care of her. This may be true, but he is completely taking away her independence. He also strikes her, a manifestation of his control.
ReplyDeleteI think the yellow wallpaper is a symbol of John’s control over his wife. She begs him to take it down but he will not and insists it is better for her to leave it up. The wallpaper drives her insane and she hates it just like John, even if it takes her a little bit of time to realize this. The wallpaper will not go away as John’s control will not. When the wife finally tears the wallpaper down with her own strength, she declares that she ‘has got out at last’. The repression leading to boredom and depression was finally destroyed.
The short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ written by Gilman is weird. The narrator is depressed after having this baby and the family plus a nurse are living in this house for three months. The narrator journals which is basically this entire story. I blame her stupid controlling husband for most of her insaneness. She probably wouldn’t have gone insane if she was allowed to journal, talk, or express her feelings in any way! Clearly the girl in yellow paper was the narrator’s hallucination of the way she viewed herself; trapped behind bars. I find in ironic the color yellow is used. It’s describing this woman crawling behind bars trying to escape during the night. However, when I see yellow I think of something happy or a happy mood. Black or gray would be more appropriate for this wall because it’s showing what this woman feels. The ending was pretty messed up. I thought she was going to kill herself. But since she pulled off all the ‘bars’ on the wall she thought she escaped her husband and this house she hated. She says, “…And I’ve pulled off most the paper, so you can’t put me back!” I’m thinking she’s developing schizophrenia because the woman crawling on the wall is a hallucination. This passage was also ironic in the sense of taking something so plain and boring, such as a wall, and making an entire story about a wall. I think a theme in this story is showing what can happen to you if you don’t express your feelings.
ReplyDeleteIn the story “The Yellow wallpaper” I thought it to be very odd and almost insane like. I could not tell if Jenny was John’s wife, daughter, or insane patient that he was working on. It was very odd indeed, the story went on and talked about how Jenny was obsessing over this yellow wall paper talking about it over and over again and pointing out all the little details in it, it was as if she was watching paint dry! It also talks about how John is a physician as if he is trying to treat his insane wife/daughter patient in a very odd way. He kept telling her that she was wrong all the time basically and saying that she needed rest. He did not really let her do a lot and did not let her get what she wanted. For example Jennie wanted a bedroom downstairs but for some reason John did not want her going downstairs. It was almost as if Jennie was a prisoner in this yellow wallpaper room. Jennie does describe the room as having bars on the window and she also makes it sound like the house is haunted by a ghost of some sort. A women creeping around during the day time that she can see out of every window she looks out of. I just find his story to be particularly odd and kind of creepy because of the way Jennie was so obsessed about this yellow wallpaper and talking about there was this shadow women inside the wall paper creeping around all the time. Very odd.
ReplyDeleteThe Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was very interesting to me. I really like the way it was written, it seemed like a journal. Not much seemed to happen in the story but I really enjoyed it. I believe that the narrator had something going on with her more than what John had said. This woman seemed to have many problems psychologically. Putting her in this room definitely did not help her cause and you can see this as the story progresses. She starts to see into the yellow wallpaper and it possesses her. She starts to see a woman within the wallpaper, I believe this woman is herself and as she starts to see more clearly what is in the wallpaper she becomes more apart of it. She sees the woman in the wallpaper shaking the bars trying to escape. She tries to free her by removing the paper, like she is freeing herself from her mental prison in a way. At the end of the story I believe that she kills herself by hanging with the rope and that is why John faints. She does this because she is mentally unstable and she finally does what she wants by not doing what John wants. After this she fully becomes the woman in the wall and never has to do as she is told and “creeps around” all she wants for as long as she wants.
ReplyDeleteIn the reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is told by a woman who is mentally ill and lives with her husband, John, in a rental house. Throughout the story, the character describes and implies that her husband has complete control over all her actions and provides her with medications. He forbids her from things that she enjoys, such as writing or going outside, just to make her stay in the house because she is “not better.” She describes that the house is beautiful, yet has a ghostly feeling and “there is something strange about the house.” When the couple moved into the house, their bedroom was on the second level in a crappy room with the wallpaper peeling off and a yellowing color. Because the house was vacant for a while, the house overall in rundown. The wallpaper that is above her bed is constantly peeling. The peeling wallpaper grabbed the main characters attention as she describes its patterns and yellowing color. It made her happy and always paid attention to “the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it;” it constantly hangs over her as it peels off. As it proceeds to the end, I believe that she was starting to see herself through the wallpaper because she would describe that she would always see this woman. At the end she tries to catch the woman with a rope. I think that she is going completely crazy.
ReplyDeleteThe story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was definitely confusing. The narrator is taken to a house out in the middle of nowhere with her husband, newborn child and nurse. She is taken there for a few months because she has an illness and they want to treat it. They do it by having her sleep all the time. This only makes it worse because she’s just lying around all day and writing in her diary about what’s going on. She’s also very fascinated by this yellow wallpaper in her room, which is half of the reason why she goes completely insane at the end of the book. She keeps saying she sees bodies behind the wallpaper, as if John stores them back there. She tries to rip it and gets it all off. She then tells John that she ripped it all out and “you can’t put me back!” Maybe, in her mind, the wallpaper is a metaphor, meaning that he is trapping her in her room all the time, forcing her to sleep, like the “bodies” she sees are trapped behind the wallpaper. Or maybe she’s just nuts. I found it ironic that the thing that the one thing that was supposed to help her get better made her even worse (sleep). Just by the tone of the story, I could tell something was up by the end and that she might have lost it. And finally, she maybe could’ve freaked out because she didn’t like the color. I know different colors cause different emotions in people, so maybe she has something in her past that we don’t know about that is associated with the color yellow. But it was an interesting read to say the least.
ReplyDelete"the yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman starts of by the narrator moving into a nice new summer home that she question show they afford. To me her not knowing how they afford it either shows to her condition, or the fact that it is an earlier time where the husband handled all the money. The narrator moves to the home with a newborn, nurse, and husband. Her husband is also her doctor. I think this is just absolutely the worse idea ever. The narrator's condition requires sleep but the lack of activity actually makes her worse. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and the wallpaper becomes the straw that broke her. I think that the nervous depression was caused by her oppression. the oppression is represented by the old yellowing paper. she finally goes absolutely crazy, causes her husband to faint, and crawls around in the wallpaper world inside of her head.
ReplyDeleteThe story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilmans was a weird one, but what story do we read that is actually considered normal? Anyways, the story is told through the perspective of a mentally unstable woman. She recently had a child and is living in a rental home with her husband John. When she moves into the rental house, her life becomes consumed by this yellow wallpaper that is in her bedroom. She constantly sees a woman figure struggling to escape these "bars" as she calls them. As the story goes on, the main character becomes obsessed with the wall paper. I believe that the main character is seeing herself in this wallpaper. The woman figure who is trying to get out is actually her, trying to help herself and escape this mindset that she has been stuck in. She is aware that there is something wrong with her but no one else will believe her or even test her theory about being mentally unstable. She becomes so involved with trying to discover what is going on within this wallpaper that she believes getting a rope will help her catch this woman in the wallpaper. It's hard to understand what she is thinking exactly because to me, it just seems as if this lady is losing her mind and is so lonely and desperate for some sort of attention that she has become infatuated with this yellow wallpaper.
ReplyDeleteThe short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charolotte Perkins Gilman, shows how much the idea of marriage has changed. In this story, its distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male ensured that women remained second-class citizens. This was the ideal attitude and socially normal thing to do during the 19th century. Woman had no real rights or say in anything. This story really shows how much progress women have made; we can now work the same jobs as men and even have say in decisions, even in government. In the story when the women told her husband she is sick he tells her to not do anything physical and to just stay in bed. He didn’t even allow her to write in her journal. So instead of standing up for herself she had to hide her journal. She couldn’t argue with her husband and even complains again about John’s patronizing, controlling ways. I’m glad that women can now stand up for themselves and are not controlled by their husbands. No one deserves to feel trapped or controlled. The women looked for an escape from behind the main pattern of the wallpaper she is so fixated on, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. The hideous paper is a symbol of the domestic life that traps women, more in the 19th century then now, but it still happens in todays society.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the aspects of the story that stood out to me was that the story line seemed a lot like modern horror films. How she was apprehensive about the house that they were staying at from the beginning and how she thought that something just wasn’t right, and just the way that she describes the room that she was staying in, how it had creepy ripped and peeling wallpaper, the barred windows, and the gate at the top of the stairs. It seemed as though from the beginning of the story that it wasn’t going to end well for this woman. As the story went on and she began to talk about the woman that she keeps seeing behind the wallpaper, it seems as though she her condition keeps getting worse and worse as she begins to see the woman more and more often. Because of this, I thought that the main focus of this story was simply the declining mental health of this woman and how it ended up leading to her death, I think that she killed herself at the end of the story. The other aspect of the story that I found rather interesting was the irony in how she was taken to the house to try and help her get better, but it was actually the house that caused her to go crazy. I thought that that was similar to what happened in Story of an Hour, how hearing that her husband was alive actually killed her, not hearing that he was dead. Overall, I thought that this story was very interesting even though I do not like horror movies. I also found it a little confusing in places, especially the end as the author doesn’t make it clear what actually happened to her.
ReplyDeleteIn the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was again very strange and a little bit confusing. This poor woman thought she was sick, but her husband and her brother who were both physicians agreed with each other on the fact that she was not sick. She spent her whole summer in a rental vacation house in a room that seemed eerie and creepy. Her husband stayed with her most of the time, but wouldn’t let her move into a room on the first floor that was more inviting and cozy. The woman was upset that she was not able to move into a different room. In my opinion, the room that she was staying in throughout the whole story was almost like a room found in an insane asylum. I also think that her husband knew she was crazy and not right in the head. The part that was strange and confusing is when she started describing how she saw shadows in her room and she thought that they were stuck in the wall. She thought they were trapped and were trying to escape. A critical detail was that the woman also saw bars on the wall almost like the wall was trying to keep something inside. At the end of the story I did not understand what happened to her. I thought that the shadows in the wall were spirits and in the end, they broke out of the wall and possessed her. In the end I think she just went crazy ripping all of the wallpaper off and she was the spirit inside the wall.
ReplyDeleteThe short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a very interesting story. After reading a bit of the story, I thought it was going to be not quite as it turned out to be after actually finishing to story. I found the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper very important. I believe that the yellow wallpaper symbolized herself and all woman in that time period to be almost caged in my their husbands, as they had no say and their own opinions were rarely heard. The main character struggles with depression, and her husband tries to help her by making to her stay in a room with yellow wallpaper. At first, she hates the wall paper and after a while she begin to see shapes and soon after realizes a woman is trapped behind bars in the wall paper. She then enjoys starring at the wallpaper, and soon realizes that she needs to let the woman escape. I think that the woman stuck behind the wall paper, is a representation of herself and she feels as if she is stuck behind this wall paper and to be let free she had to realize this and tear the wallpaper down. I think that a lot of woman in this time did not have a whole lot of say and she was therefore feeling very depressed. The author also mentioned something about them have a baby, and that made me wonder if she was actually suffering the baby blues. Either way, in the end, her husband helped her get better and she escaped from behind the yellow wallpaper. Overall, I enjoyed this story and liked that there was a true significance behind the yellow wallpaper.
ReplyDelete“The Yellow Wallpaper”, takes us into the life of a very ill woman who is so trapped in her own life that she can’t separate fantasy from reality. She moves into what seems to be a haunted house, to escape her problems but it only worsens her condition. She begins to see a woman trapped in the wallpaper and is determined to try to free this person. I believe that the vision of this woman trapped is her mind portraying her life to her, because she is trapped in her marriage. Her husband is very controlling and treats her like a little girl throughout the whole story. When the woman is finally freed from the wallpaper, I believe it symbolizes her finally taking control of her life.
ReplyDeleteThe “ The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a women with some sort of mental disorder such as depression or an anxiety disorder. I don’t like that her husband is controlling her at every moment. Even though John is a doctor, he isn’t even able to treat his wife properly. I find it strange that she is not told by John or a physician her diagnosis. She is just told they she is “unwell” and not properly. If she is aware of the problem and not controlled by John, perhaps she can get well sooner. Certain points it seems as if John is sabotaging is her recovery because he unwilling to even listen to her suggestion.
ReplyDeleteThis short story also reminded me of the past when women’s were being controlled by their husbands or men and not considered independent of smart enough to think for themselves. John basically controls all aspects of her life, she is not even allowed to write or sleep as she pleases. I feel fortunate enough to be a women in United States where we have relativity same rule between the genders and a chance to have proper education. It’s unfortunate, that there are still some cultures and countries where men are supreme and women aren’t allowed an education or make their own life choices.
“The Yellow Wallpaper “ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a strange and kind of confusing story. It starts out with a couple going to a new place which is intended to help the narrator’s current health condition. However we soon find that it only does the opposite. She seems to have a mental disorder of some sort and although her husband is a doctor, he claims that she is fine and healthy. While arriving at the house the narrator gets strange feelings and soon becomes fearful of the wallpaper in one of the rooms. As they described the room I got the feeling that it could be related to some sort of psychiatric hospital with the barred windows and torn wallpaper and everything else. As the narrator resides in this room, she soon becomes fixed on the wallpaper and begins to see women within it, trying to escape. At the end of the story she reveals that she has been creeping around and shaking the bars to release the women which I believe is herself. I think she has convinced herself that she is from the wallpaper and she is trying to release herself from that room, and from the control of her husband. The control of her husband also plays a big role in this story. Being a doctor, her husband claims that the room is helping her condition and that she is getting better. However, there is clearly something mentally wrong with her and the wallpaper is not helping her recover. She always obeys her husband and never questions him. I believe that if she fought for what she wanted, like switching rooms for example, there would have been a different effect on her. It seems like her husband was trying to control everything she did and many aspects of her life.
ReplyDeleteThe short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was confusing to me at first, but by the end of the story I believe to have grasped what was occurring. It all begins with a couple, a woman who seems to not have a job, and her husband who is a physician. The Husband is extremely controlling, and even when she says that something is wrong with her he tells her that she is fine and that she shouldn't worry about it. Being a physician you would think that he would take the time to care of his wife but he does the opposite, he takes her to a house for a few weeks to help her current health, but this house shows to put even more stress on the woman. The woman complains constantly about the wallpaper that is in their bedroom, she tells the husband how it has an awful pattern, and that it smells, and she even describes how there is a woman behind the wallpaper moving it and creeping around the house. The husband simply brushes off what she says and tells her that she is doing fine and that she's starting to look better. The last scene of this story describes how the woman tore down all the wallpaper one day while her husband was away, in search of the woman that is behind it. I believe that after reading this that the wallpaper is a symbol for what is going on in the woman's life. I feel that when she looks at the wallpaper and sees a terrible pattern and how awful it looks and smells, she's actually looking at herself, and how she is scared to stand up for herself as her husband is controlling her. I believe that she wants to tear down the wallpaper to find the woman behind it because that shows she wants to change her life and stand up for herself and take control of her own life.
ReplyDelete“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman involves a woman with a mental illness and her husband, a physician. The married people are living in a rented place that has this certain yellow wallpaper. The woman becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and starts to analyze the wallpaper’s patterns. She notices the patterns on the wallpaper are moving and there is a women confined in the wallpaper. But her husband would not understand the things she sees because he believes there is nothing wrong with her. However, she has to have some kind of mental illness because people don’t have these reactions to wallpapers. I think her husband decided to ignore her pleas and warnings that she was sick. Instead, he tried to confine her by limiting what she could do, telling her everything was fine, and making her rest more. But throughout the story I started to think of two different perspectives of what the woman was going through. I thought that the yellow wallpaper situation was a sign that her mental illness was progressing. Her illness was getting worse because she was not receiving proper care for the illness. However, I also thought that the yellow wallpaper situation symbolized confinement. She wasn't allowed to go outside, visit relatives, or do many things she enjoyed. Her husband took away many of her freedoms and all that was left of her was a lifeless person. She became the women who started to sleep throughout the day and couldn't even think for herself. But as she explained this woman in the wallpaper, it seemed like she was talking about herself. She said the woman was confined by the bars, similar to her confinement within the house. When she tore the wallpaper down she was no longer stuck, and her husband no longer controlled her.
ReplyDelete"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a confusing but interesting story once I understood it. The story is about a woman with a mental illness. She and her husband go to a mansion to live there and the woman becomes fixated on a certain wallpaper in the room. Her husband is a doctor and believes there is nothing wrong with his wife and is controlling of her. The woman keeps a journal to help her even though her husband does not approve of it. As the woman continues to become fixated with the yellow wallpaper she start to see things within in. She sees a woman trying to escape and attempts to help the woman. From the beginning, I thought the woman trying to escape symbolized the narrator. The narrator is trying is escape from her husband and his controlling nature. Though the narrator is fixated on the wallpaper she does sometimes mention her husband and how she doesn't like his controlling ways but does not know how to escape. She sees herself as the yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is stuck in the room just like her and cannot escape. When the narrator finally tore down the wallpaper, I believe it symbolized her escaping from her husband's grasp. She was finally free.
ReplyDeleteAs I read the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I could feel the suspense increasing in the plot as if it were a horror movie. In the story a woman that suffers from post-partum depression has just had a baby and she and her husband John are vacationing in a mansion for a couple weeks. This little get away is supposed to help the woman become more relaxed, stress-free and to somewhat heal and improve her condition. However, it turns out to do the complete opposite. Her husband thought of this to be a positive decision considering he is a doctor but in fact he doesn’t really understand his own wife’s condition and she doesn’t really explain to him what she goes through. He only believes that she is un- well and needs to spend time alone to get better. He makes sure this happens by having her enclosed in a bedroom upstairs of the mansion and does not let her roam the grounds. He is very controlling and expects her to obey him. She doesn’t think of it as a bad thing because she knows that he is loving, caring and only wants the best for her but at certain points it starts to become very bothersome. The room soon drives her insane. She feels trapped and unfocused. She immediately is annoyed with the odd yellow wallpaper in the room which is the only thing that really stands out since the house and room are barely furnished. Hallucinations soon attack her mind. As she strives for fresh air and freedom, she writes of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper in her journal. This journal contains all of her true feelings and emotions, something that she hides well from John. As the days passed, soon for their departure from the so called “vacation” she envisioned the woman behind the wallpaper, trapped, breaking free little by little. She even helped by scraping the wallpaper as well trying to help her. Near the end of the story when she is in the room her husband becomes panicked because she no longer has the desire to leave the room but has locked herself in it. When he gets the key and enters, he notices his wife crawling on the floor circling the room like a crazy person as if she were possessed (we could think) and he faints. She continues to do this even with John on the floor and the wallpaper is scraped, gone and the wall bare. Us as the readers can make the connection that the yellow wallpaper was an allegorical representation of what she is going through in her life. At the end the woman is free because the wallpaper cannot contain her anymore as well is she because it is time to go home.
ReplyDelete"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a very good short story about a woman who is accused by her husband as being basically hysterical. Her husband, a physician, says that she needs to spend some time alone to get over her condition and be able to rejoin the community and her husband and past life. She is locked in a bedroom on the highest floor of the mansion her and her husband are vacationing in. The bedroom seems pretty normal, except that it has very strange wallpaper. At first, there is no problem for the woman in this room, but, as she spends more time alone with it, the wallpaper begins to drive her insane. She begins to see a woman "trapped" inside the wallpaper, and tries to free her. She spends her time tearing the wallpaper off of the wall to help her newly discovered friend that was trapped. By the end of the story, the woman's husband, John, gets the key and goes to check on his wife. When he opens the door, he finds her crawling around on the floor with the walls bare of the yellow wallpaper containing the woman that only his wife could see and resembled herself. Upon seeing this horrific sight, John faints, and his wife continues on as if he were never in the room. We can see the wallpaper as a symbol for the woman's condition, because she seemed to see herself in it as if it were a mirror, and she had to free herself from the confines of the wall.
ReplyDelete"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was very interesting to me.The short story starts of by the narrator moving into a nice new summer home that she question show they afford. That just makes me feel as what state she is in or it was just one of those situations where her husband handles all the money. The narrator then starts to become obsessed with the wallpaper. I believe that was what pushed her over the edge. I also found it ironic that the one thing that was suppose to make her better, which was sleep, ended up making her even worse. What i was thinking that maybe some how the color yellow meant something to her and that something bad happened to her in the past that had to do with the color.
ReplyDelete"The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very strange story to read yet I found myself very intrigued by it. All the while the woman is thought to be getting better from her nervous depress it is truly getting worse and she is starting to imagine things in the wallpaper of the room she is in. She speaks of its movement and its strange shapes and color and how she can see a woman in it. I think this is her reflecting on her on life and realizing it is much like the pattern on the wallpaper; very complex and recently , very sufficicating and trapping. Her husband insists that she sleeps and remains quiete and composed even I'm this time of difficulty with the condition he does not believe she has and yet all she wants to do is break free and live as normally as possible to regain her mental health. In this way she becomes trapped like the woman behind bars in the wallpaper. Rattling trying to escape in the dark but maintaining calm and collected during the day when everyone is watching. Having experienced this she does appear more mentally instable than what was previously mentioned but in a way it gave her something to do to feel human and in a way sane. Feelings and emotions are what makes us human, seeing this lady in the wallpaper caused her to feel and analyze her own life while in a stressful situation therefore making her feel that she wasn't completely useless and that she needed to make a change. Yes, she did become a little obsessed and went a bit crazy, but she didn't conform to being who they expected her to be, quiete , composed, & "normal."
ReplyDeleteThe short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was an interesting read for me. The story is based on a women suffering from what I believed was severe depression, she had just delivered a baby, and her husband John and her moved into a new home. Throughout the story the readers gain a very clear and detailed understanding of her thoughts and how she is clearly struggling with something either mentally or medically. Unfortunately her husband doesn’t believe that anything is wrong with as he is a Physician, and supposedly would know if something was wrong with her. At this new house instead of helping her, it is making her become even more stressed, and she continuously complains about the wallpaper in their bedroom. Eventually one night while John was away she tarred down the wallpaper in search of a woman behind it. I felt in the beginning sorry for her husband, for not knowing how to help his wife, but towards the end I was frustrated with his inability to truly see that there is clearly something wrong with her. John was so controlling over his wife, I believe that the wallpaper was a symbol of how trapped, and unfulfilled she felt her life had become. The tearing of the wallpaper represented the change in her life she is now willing to make, by finally wanting to stand up for herself!
ReplyDelete"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very easy read and it kept my interest. When I first heard that we were reading this short story for class, I clearly remembered what this story was about although I don't remember actually reading it before. This story is about a woman who moved into a colonial mansion for the summer with her husband (a physician) who believed that this would be good for her and the recent state she has been in lately (even though he believes she is not sick, just nervous and hysterical). The way this woman describes this house gives the reader the sense that it there is something not right about this house and it could even possibly be haunted. This woman spends all of her time in the large bedroom on the highest floor of the house, and she notices how strange the wallpaper is. Not only was it hideous, there was something about the pattern that caught her interest. When she is alone in that room, she studies the wallpaper and says it is like there is "a woman stooping down and creeping out behind that pattern". This alone is enough to let the reader know that this woman is not in healthy state of mind. Or another possibility is that everyone around her -her husband and brother who are both physicians- has made her believe that she is just nervous and her mind is playing tricks on her, while they just might not want to believe anything that she sees. She tells the "paper" (as she writes in secret) things she would never bring up to her husband, knowing how he would react. The woman gets upset at Jennie when she catches her with her papers in her room, because she doesn't want anyone else to know of the woman in the wallpaper. This woman believes that she sees this figure creeping on her during the day from outside in the gardens and on the paths. The woman she sees creeping on her could just be her mind thinking that this is true, as a parallel to what she wants, which is to escape her "prison".
ReplyDeleteI think that this was a very powerful story. This woman was trapped from the beginning first by her husband, then by her frustrations and anxieties. Her husband never took her seriously. This was a major problem because she needed an escape. She was very overwhelmed and had no one to talk to which is why she created these women in the wall. They talked to her they were there for her when no one else was. In the end she got to escape. It was not in the way she wanted, but she escaped the cage that everyone else trapped her in.
ReplyDeleteThe short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was a very good story. This is about a woman who needed help from her husband and she never got it. In this story there is a woman who is suffering from nervous depression. The doctor that is treating her also happens to be her husband. Her husband bought a house for them to move into for the summer. This was a very nice big house. Her husband tells her that she is not allowed to do much physical activity and no reading or writing. This was causing the narrator to go even more insane. After a little while she secretly gets a journal and starts writing in it. After being so lonely and bored she starts to get a fixation on the wallpaper in her room. After observing it for a while she begins to go crazy with it and believes that there is a woman behind the wallpaper trying to get out. She related it to herself and said that she was the one trying to get out. I believe this was all put on the husband. If the husband let her have more freedom and spent more time with her that probably would have been the best treatment.
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