Identity In Kate Chopin's The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper is about a women driven senseless by post-partum depression and an unsafe treatment. The story is essentially about identity. The narrator and her physician husband have leased a house in order for her to relax and recover from an episode of depression. The narrator is ordered by her husband to dodge any kind of vigorous activity as it will only worsen her condition. Her husband’s cure calls for her to remain restricted to her bedroom. As she is confined to the room and disadvantaged to any stimulation, the narrator’s depression get worse and begins to change into psychosis. The narrator, Jane, projected an imaginary women against the wallpaper's pattern which symbolizes the conflict she experiences and also symbolize her. Women during the nineteenth century were often portrayed as submissive to men. They were often oppressed by society and males influenced their lives and every…show more content…
He treats her as inferior, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (1). John sees his wife’s thinking and thoughts as laughable, never taking them seriously. Another example showing how society during that time didn’t respect a women’s opinions is “It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work” (3). Assisting the expression of the author’s feminist views is the narrator’s dialogue. Her craving to express her opinions and ideas breaks through even society’s roughest barriers, “I did write for a while in spite of them” (1). She is unable to express how she really feels so she writes about it, at which point she is exhausted due to the need to hide her thoughts from society and her husband. Though her husband has detached all control and accountability from her hands, making her feel confined and useless, she is stressed by society to love and thank her husband for eliminating the need to think from her
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