Yellow Wallpaper Theme

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In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” there are various themes that lead to the main conflict of the story. The depressive symptom a woman faces causes her physician husband to treat her for a few months in hopes of helping curing her disorder. Through the use of medication and isolation from the large world, the narrator takes the readers on a journey through her loss of reality. The conflicts freedom, confinement, and madness each have a specific part in shaping the overall tone and direction of the story. The analysis of the central theme of the story, the rest cure, reveals the challenges both characters face: challenging treatment options for disorder, which eventually lead to the downfall of the patient’s…show more content…
Although the narrator’s husband and brother feel she has no serious issue with depression, they give her medication and put her on bed rest. As the husband uses his medical authority to assure his wife that her condition is not “dangerous”, he makes it clear to her, he wishes not to discuss it any further. (Knight). Not showing any concern for his wife’s conditions shows how much his wife’s health means to him. In his attempt to “cure her” he states she cannot work or write or do anything , because he believes that thinking about her condition and express herself in any way as it is the worst thing she can do and will show down her healing process. While keeping her isolated in the nursery, and out of touch from reality, he tests his medical skills and tries to cure her, by taking away her freedom by forcing her to say in the room. “There comes John, and I must put this way- he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 553). The narrator has to hide her notebook from her husband as she fears he would be disappointed in her actions. The fact that the narrator had to rid of only source of self-expression only makes it harder for her to deal with her situation. At the beginning of…show more content…
As soon as the narrator and husband enter the room, she feels as though there is something off about it, showing she is uncomfortable with staying in the room. Narrator is lonely and states, “it is discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work” (Gilman 554). She longs for some sort of attention and affection from her husband or anyone in general. “While her husband spends his nights in town, playing his role as a physician, he leaves his wife isolated in the house by her, which worsens her condition more than helping it. The juxtaposition of the hated room with John's appearance (John as responsible for her being kept in that particular room, as well as John responsible for her not being allowed to write) confirms her designating him her jailer, in several ways” (Wagner-Martin). The narrator’s desperation and need to mend the lack of communication in her life at that time in her life, ultimately leads to her down fall and the loss of her sanity. Ironically the husband believed he was helping her, when he only made her condition far worse than when she arrived. In the beginning, she was aware of her surrounding and her condition as time exceeded her merely forgets her issue and becomes one with it. Letting it take over her life day by day, not realizing what has happened to her before it was too late to run away. It is quite obvious that the narrator’s journey into
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