She cannot focus on just one thing and flows from one thing to another. "It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight" (Gilman, 1973) She talks about the room then the garden then wallpaper
"There is a grim poetic justice in the fact that this coldly practical man literally freezes to death because he has committed the fatal blunder not only of spurning companionship but also of scorning the old timer's wisdom."(Labor, p
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman placed the rest cure in the cultural context of late nineteenth century. The story was a metaphor for the lives of middle-class women trapped in other people's expectations;…" (Patarca-Montero, p
A Reporter's Narrative Today, a typical day in the 19th century, American women are looked at as the weaker sex, and doctors are performing some controversial procedures in attempts to "cure" women of their maladies. The woman of today struggles with any illness because the "…male dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women" because males understand women's health problems better than women understand themselves (Cutter, 2001)
Isaac Baker-Brown) were conducting clitoridectomies (removing the clitoris) on women as a supposed cure for hysteria. After all, as Baker-Brown would say after a clitoridectomy, "…intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settle back into the bosom of their families, and married women former averse to sexual duties became pregnant" (Maines, 2001)
Gilman's depression was trivialized, with the doctor concluding that there was nothing wrong with her. The cure according to the doctor was to "live as domestic a life as far as possible" and to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day" (Gilman, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" 844)
Gilman's depression was trivialized, with the doctor concluding that there was nothing wrong with her. The cure according to the doctor was to "live as domestic a life as far as possible" and to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day" (Gilman, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" 844)
This is clearly seen at the start of "The Yellow Wallpaper" where the narrator describes how her husband views her. One of the first statements she makes is that "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage" (Gilman 833)
This is also emphasized at several points during the play where Nora makes comments that show that she is not completely naive about the role she has accepted. In discussing the problem with the borrowed money and the possibility of admitting to her husband that she borrowed the money Nora says that if he found it "It would upset our mutual relations altogether; our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is now" (Ibsen 168)
YELLOW WALLPAPER & FEMALE DEPRESSION Modern principles of mental health reflect the view that clinical depression comprises both organic pathology and environmental influences. In the case of the former, medical intervention consists of psychoactive medications such as selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) to reverse the biochemical causes of the symptoms associated with clinical depression (Branden, 1998)
2). Depression, Productive Work, and Social Relationships: In general, the engagement in useful work was already valued as a desirable component of human character by the 19th century, but that concept still held little relevance to women, because their appropriate role in society was still perceived to be limited to motherhood and caring for the home so that her husband could more comfortably pursue employment outside the home (Kasl, 1990)
Gradually, the physician's wife begins to meeting this creep woman in the bedroom. Without the knowledge of her husband, she is motivated to identify the secrets behind the yellow wallpaper (Gilman 33)
She realizes that the wallpaper design has attained a strange pattern, and this interrupts her writing. At this time, John's sister is working for them as a housekeeper (Johnson 18)
She is, at least initially, trying to somehow maintain her subjectivity despite male interdiction." (Herndl 130) Writing in her journal therefore becomes her way of rebelling; of asserting herself against a world that refuses to listen to her innermost feelings and perceptions
resonated with a faint sense of that disturbance so prevalent in Gilman's tale because arabesque is an uncentred and indeterminate style of decoration. "(Roth) in other words the wallpaper becomes a physical expression of her own dislocation of self and loss of identity
She says, "John is a physician, and perhaps -- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) -- perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick!" (Gilman)
Symbolically, the emptiness which the narrator perceives is related to her own mental emptiness, for the house has apparently been "dejected" by others in the past, due to its queer atmosphere; she too has been "dejected," especially by her husband who "does not believe I am sick" and equates her depression with "a slight hysterical tendency" (Hunt, 171). A little further on in the text, the narrator admits that the emptiness of the house "spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care -- there is something strange about the house -- I can feel it" (Hunt, 172), an indication that the house itself may be responsible for the narrator's "nervous condition" (Gilman, 1980, 167), or at least may exacerbate such feelings
. A steady brainache that fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress" (Hunt, 184)
As the text by Davison (2004) contributes, "given that the narrator in Gilman's tale is a femme couverte who has no legal power over her own person -- like her flesh-and-blood counterparts at the time the story was published -- and that her husband is a physician whose pronouncements about his wife's illness are condoned by a spectral yet powerful medical establishment, it is no wonder that his wife grows increasingly fearful of him and suspects him of conspiring with his sister against her." (Davison, 48) This helps to drive what the research discussed here will promote as a distinct literary tradition to be known as Female Gothic, so-named for the shared condition of American women during the time of Gilman's writing, who lived in obscurity in spite of the instincts and inspirations driving them to desire more
Based on her own experience, the short story aims to give an opposite treatment for the end of the nineteen-century rest cure, which almost made her to become insane. (Gilman, 2003) Many parts of the story are being constructed as to observe and analyze the steps that take the character to her insanity moment