An Analysis Of 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

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"Suppressing the Depressed” Freedom is an extremely fragile privilege that can be taken away from an individual at any given time with or without the person’s permission. To achieve equality, it took years of hard work for women to prove that their gender was no worse than any man’s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with a woman describing her life and surroundings. The summer scenery is disrupted quickly by the narrator’s prolonging sickness which the reader sees evolving throughout the story. The narrator is negatively affected by John and Jennie as they take away her freedom, and instead of receiving positive energy and true concern for her sickness, her mental state is worsened which leads…show more content…
John, the narrator’s husband, is a physician professionally, and also prescribes a treatment for the narrator. Her husband and brother deny her sickness to be real, however, and her husband forbids her from doing any physical work or writing to avoid her sickness from prolonging. John makes it seem that he really loves his wife and wants her to be cured, yet, his treatment has a negative effect on the narrator. The narrator states, “John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (Gilman 542). Here, the reader sees that the narrator must block out her pain instead of treat it to not upset her husband. The important question to ask is, why did her husband prescribe the narrator a treatment if he did not believe she was sick? The narrator’s husband’s false concern could have only been created to allow her husband to have more control over her. He did not allow her to do merely anything throughout the day, but simply rest. The narrator feels trapped by her husband’s controlling behavior and wants to free herself desperately. She is bound to her husband’s ruling and states, “Perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman 542). John does not fulfill the narrator’s simple wish to switch bedrooms and the narrator is trapped in a room she fears. Subsequently, the narrator unravels the factitious characters behind the wallpaper, and finds freedom in her life at the end of story when she helps the jailed woman in the yellow wallpaper escape by destroying the wallpaper. Although the narrator is creating the trapped woman in her mind, she is actually responding to her deprivation of freedom. Up until now, the narrator lives by everyone else’s rules, and she is not able to do simple activities which could have actually caused her to go

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