Themes In Charlotte Perkins Stetson's The Yellow Wallpaper
538 Words3 Pages
“The Yellow Wallpaper”, as written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, follows a woman, the narrators, as she struggles with keeping herself sane due to her anxiety. The piece uses this premise to further lead the reader into understanding more about the core messages the author is trying to get across. Themes play a large role in literature, to fully comprehend the merits of a text the themes must first be taken into consideration. Confinement and descent into madness are the two prevalent themes that drive the plot. Confinement shows up constantly throughout the story and serves to help the reader delve deeper into the messages the text is trying to portray. We see, in the text, the true horrors of being trapped both physically and mentally through the narrator’s perspective. Physically Jane is restricted by her husband John. Under his rule she isn’t allowed to follow her true passion of writing because John, a noteworthy physician, says…show more content… The author, yet again, displays what it means to fall into deep hysteria and its causes. The main cause of Jane’s hysteria could be attributed to her husband John. In no way is he trying to cause it but, his overbearing methods of keeping her anxiety down is a major contributing factor. John believes that by keeping tabs on Jane and controlling everything about her life, such as that she sleeps with him and does not write, will help her. John will not listen to superstition, when his wife tells him that she believes that the house is eerie he blows it off and says it’s a drought. It is the small gestures that John makes to cure his wife that inevitably cause the hysteria. The author shows the reader how madness is not always outward but is an abstract concept that, as John in the text has shown us cannot be fought rationally. It is the confinement and the death of her creative spark that takes Jane’s nervous condition and magnifies it to larger