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The yellow wallpaper 2 (Click to select text)
"The Yellow Wallpaper", written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story with many interpretations and is a source of many reactions. One interpretation that appears often, is the idea that a woman who is not afraid of looking at things in an intangible sense is looked upon as some sort of "lunatic." This reason was sometimes a primary reason to drive a woman, not medically claimed as ill, to live in a mansion, "standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village," was a practice very popular yet very wrong. By placing this woman in this mansion, forcing her to quit her writing and all other sources of communication and excitement, condemned this woman into a state of depression and hallucination. Therefor, by placing a woman in the backcountry and forcing her ignore all others forms of life, is a form of abuse that needed to be expressed thought this short story. A woman that looks within the depths of a house and characterizes it as "haunted" is not evidence to lock her up and diagnose her with an illness. "A colonial mansion…I would say haunted house…but that would be asking too much of fate," shows the narrator's superstitious characteristic that places her outside the walls of society. By moving into a bedroom, the narrator feels a form of solitude. The narrator is eventually forced to discontinue her writing for she is afraid to hear the words of her husband. "He hates to have me write a word." Writing was a form of communication within the writer that allowed her express her deepest emotions. By forcing this to seize, the writer, is later on left only to contain these feelings and emotions with thin herself and stare at the wallpaper with, "the lame uncertain curves for a little distance," that, "suddenly commit suicide." Having a cheerful attitude in the beginning of this story, and later on having a suicidal manner is an extreme change. This is all proof of the mental abuse that is being laid upon this woman who is suppressed. By continuously staring at the yellow wallpaper within her room, the narrator begins to view shapes and images that eventually fill her head. "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere." This within itself shows the reactions of confinement that the narrator feels. Because the room begins to become an intimate "friend" of the patient, she fells that "the front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!" This woman is a figment of the imagination that the narrator creates to live out her life. The woman is "given life" because of the narrator's eagerness to feel some form of presence besides her own to keep her company. "As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her." By seeing this woman, the narrator begins to think that freeing the woman behind the wallpaper will later on free her from the forbidden world that she was kept from for 3 months. This imprisonment has backfired, for the main purpose of it was to retain the health of the narrator. Yet, all it did was drive her mental capacity to an even further distance. The wallpaper was to become her friend, yet the narrator was left to suffer and subdue to the diagnosis of her husband. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story that has been proven to be a story about the mental abuse many women have been subdued to during the 19th century. Not only has it been during that era, but also it continues to happen throughout society. By forcing a woman to seize her writing and her communication to members of society, it is inevitable for her to continuously decline in mental sanity.
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