"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman Perkins, is an amazing insight into mental illness. This family moves into a colonial house for a few weeks and the narrator states a lot of information about the house in the beginning of the story "The most beautiful place! It is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about". This quote makes the reader believe that she will experience the beauty of the gardens and be outside recovering from her illness, however, this woman never gets to leave the house she is forced to stay in bed starring at the wallpaper because her husband/doctor "John" has prescribed bed rest. At first I felt so sad that she was on bed rest with an illness. Perkins describes her perspective of the wall paper as "The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint....". The feeling of laying in bed day after day looking at this horrible scene in the wall paper was awful. As the story progresses and she goes back to the wall paper and forms a relationship with it, I started to realize something was terrible wrong. The narrator is clearly suffering a mental illness and her husband is not helping matters by depriving her of being outside and interacting with people and her baby. She changes her perspective about half way through and begins to appreciate the patterns of the wallpaper, as if the writer was allowing us into the mind of a very sick lady. Mental Illness is misunderstood by many people in the world and I feel that this was a wonderful way to portray how it feels in the mind of someone suffering a mental breakdown. Her reality fluctuates between what is real and what is not. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the wall paper, and in many was she does see that woman, it is herself. She ends up locking her self into the room and begins a pattern of her own, crawling and standing on furniture to rip the paper away from the walls to allow the trapped woman out from her prison. This is a metaphor for the narrators need to get out of the room and the life style that has trapped her in her own mind. She has felt trapped and must get out in order to survive and become well again. When John comes home to find her he faints from the sight of her actions that her illness has caused and what has become of her.
After reading a little more about this author, I found that she is recalling her own life and she wrote this story in the late 1800's to allow others to understand the mind of a mentally ill person so that we may better understand this tragic sad illness.
Debra,
ReplyDeleteYou make an excellent point in your post about the connection between the woman in the wallpaper and the narrator. The narrator identifies with the woman in the wallpaper since both feel trapped. In the case of the narrator, she feels trapped by the patriarchal--or male-dominated--society in which she lives. Her attempts to free the woman are paralleled by her own attempts to free herself. Various critics have interpreted her descent into madness as the only possible way of escape.
To me the wallpaper became a sort of metaphor for the narrators own mental illness. In the beginning of the story she is just starting to admit but does not want to accept her own mental illness, but by the end she can no longer hide or contain her madness. Her writings give her an escape at first but become a labor as the story progresses. The fact that she starts seeing the woman everywhere and trys to see if she can see her out of more than one window at a time shows that her grip on logic and reality are starting to slip away. To me this is a story about the decent into madness that many people have taken.
ReplyDeleteI agree with how you pointed out that her husband is only making matters worse. Because you can see that he is shutting her out of reality and it is not fair for someone with a mental illness to be locked out from all reality. This is definitely only going to make her "so called" condition worse, that is if she even has a mental condition in the first place. Maybe she is suffering from post postpartum depression after all she is talking about how her and her husband have a child together. Now that we read this story we do get to behind the mind of a person who seems to have had some sort of mental breakdown and needs help instead of being locked up in a room.
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