The fact that the woman couldn't do as she pleased kind of made me angry. She was kept on such a short leash by her husband John, and when he wasn't there she was watched so closely by Jennie. With a nervous condition, it doesn't help to stay inside in the same room for months, athough this was John's thinking. As a physician, John thought he was right about what was best to make his wife better, but I don't know if he was really trying to do what was best for her. It kind of seemed to me that he was kind of testing her to see how much she could take before she cracked. She should've been allowed to go outside and enjoy the outside world, not just an awful yellow room. It is clear as the woman continues to write that the longer she stays in that yellow room, her health decreased. I think the end of the story showed how cooped up and trapped the woman felt by "becoming" the woman who was trapped behind the wallpaper.
Wow, what an intriguing story this was! I thought it was neat and at the same time kind of scary to “crawl” into the mind of a person who had a mental illness. From what I read of the story, I think the woman either had a child and lost it and that caused her illness, or she was taken away from it because of her illness. Either way, going away to be alone and think about what she had lost just made it worse. She stayed in the nursery because she missed her child and I believe that dwelling on her baby was a major part of the problem. I don’t know if the husband took her out to the country just to improve her health or to hide her from society because he was a prominent member in the town as a physician. Maybe having a mentally ill wife would have been bad for his reputation, or maybe he sincerely cared about her well-being. Also, could the woman behind the wallpaper symbolize her being trapped in her own mind and grief? I’m not sure what yellow signifies, though. I can’t wait to discuss it in class!
After reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the only thing my mind could think of was “Oh my God, I think I am going to be sick”. Being put in the shoes of a patient who is mentally ill was quite positively nerve-racking. The main character in this story, a woman with her fare share of issues, has been diagnosed with a temporary nervous depression. It is obvious that the woman is suffering from some dramatic departure from a child. Although my opinion of this story is not favorable, as shown by society when it was first released, Gilman did in fact do a fantastic job of getting his point across. He wrote this passage for individual readers to prevent themselves from being driven absolutely mad. I must be honest and say that I did not enjoy the reading but it was in fact mind-opening and a beneficial experience to say the least. Hopefully Gilman has some other short stories that I can read so I can begin to understand his writings.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a little disturbing. I mean disturbing in a way that I felt sorry for the woman. This woman obviously was closed up in her house by her husband for far too long. Her husband, John, told her that she was sick with a nervous depression. Although John is a physician, I don’t believe he gave a correct diagnosis in making his wife stay inside all the time. I think that by keeping the woman in the house all the time, it made her go crazy. I think that her fascination with the details of the house and the garden just showed characteristics of her being female. Maybe one of her biggest desires was to be outside and plant in the garden, but she wasn’t allowed to. I got the feeling that the woman “in the wallpaper” was her, as if she wanted to come out of the controlled and closed life that she always lived in. At the end of the story it proved that the woman had gone completely crazy. The story all together is quite depressing and it made me feel sorry for the life the woman had to live.
I really liked this story. It shows how hard things were for people with mental illnesses during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The narrator wasn’t even that bad off to start with and she was kept in a room she hated and feared for months, I can’t even imagine how the really bad off patients were treated. Her husband not only didn’t let her do anything to get her mind off things, such as writing, but he also criticized her fears. He wouldn’t allow her to move to a different room because he wanted to be near her so he could keep an eye on her at night She didn’t want to be in the room in the first place because of the yellow wallpaper and eventually that’s what drove her crazy. She began to see a woman crawling behind the bar pattern on the wallpaper, trying to get out. She eventually tears as much of the wallpaper as she can off the walls, believing herself to be the woman she saw, so that they can’t put her back into the wallpaper.
I really liked reading this story a lot, but there were certain parts of it that confused me. I couldn't really decide if the ending of the story was tragic or triumphant for the woman. In some ways I thought it was really tragic because she obviously goes crazy due to whatever psychological problems she has and the fact that she has been confined for so long. However, at the same time I saw some triumph in the end because she takes down all the wallpaper and "frees" the woman behind it (which I thought might represent herself). So even though she has gone a little crazy, she has escaped her husband's control and exposed one of his weaknesses creating some kind of personal identity for herself.
This shows how much the medical treatment for women have changed over this past few hundred years. In the past doctors such as her husband and brother or Silas Mitchell would prescribe a “Rest cure.” Its kind of funny how they seriously thought doing absolutely nothing for half a year or even longer could make someone better. It just doesn’t even make sense. How could locking someone away for months away from the rest of the world in a secluded country estate make them get over depression? Today we realize that it takes interaction with other people to get over things such as this. You can’t really blame her husband or brother because they were only doing what they thought was best for her. It was part of the medical practices of their time and were only following what their predecessors before them said.
There is a poem by Eric Victorino that talks about how society accepts that doctors prescribing pills for everything, and that it shouldnt be that way and i wanted to share:
drug commercials on the television (rev.) taken from the book COMA THERAPY
we take pills for everything.
got a terrible case of social anxiety? depression? no problem, we’ve got a pill for that. you need medical attention these are serious afflictions- luck of the draw was so very unkind to you.
can't be caused by your upbringing... no. not your weaknesses or your under-developed communication skills, they have nothing to do with your inability to cope.
it's not your diet, it’s not your lack of exercise -
it can't be the fluorescent lighting in your drab little cubicle...
it isn't your unwillingness to improve your surroundings, your shitty situation.
you never make friends... you never take chances... or a vacation... you never take a fucking second to breathe.
your symptoms couldn't possibly have anything to do with giving up on love, giving up on life, giving up on your dreams, giving up on yourself...
no, it's not your fault. it never is. it's a chemical imbalance. it's your misfiring neuron receptors! see our ad in LIFE magazine! oh look, there's a cute little cartoon character bouncing around on the TV screen telling you you're depressed and Zoloft is the only answer.
salvation is now available in easy-to-swallow-caplets…
a narrator adds in a trustworthy, comforting tone:
"fixing the causes of your disease? fuck that! let’s focus on the symptoms! swallow this… side effects may include but are not limited to: diarrhea, constipation, feelings of inadequacy, vomiting, headache, muscle aches, upset stomach, runny nose, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, severe depression, recurring thoughts of death and suicide, erections lasting more than four to six hours..."
you’re so very fucked up but we've got the cure! we’ve got just the magic feather for you in any color you choose…
take the newest, the best, the strongest brand-name-brain fuckers.
numb, numb, numb enough... to be sure you're able to cope with the miserable life you've been stumbling through.
just enough pills to be sure you forget about the time you've wasted, forget about the potential you once had numb enough to get back to work.
so where'd that dream you had go?
what was your first love's name?
what did you want to be once you were all grown up?
what did you end up with?
I know, it must hurt to have grown up so full of promise, so bright with dreams, so full of the lie.
what do you want to be, little guy, when you grow up?
astronaut, movie star, doctor?
too bad. BOOM! tax attorney. BOOM! shift manager. taxi driver. counter clerk. delivery driver. software engineer. bartender. customer service representative...
for that pain, that deep, dull heart ache... more and more pills.
I wonder if doctors will ever start to prescribe ambition, goals, creativity- paintbrushes, pens and blank journals a lump of soft clay, anything before resorting to the pills…
pills for the disease pills for the pain of growing up full of such vibrant, colorful dreams- only to watch them fade away eventually replaced with dull beige and grays.
I found this short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", my least favorite of all the short stories because for me this one was the hardest to understand. I have always had a hard time understanding literature but most of the time I could figure out enough to be able to understand what was going on in the story. But this was not the case in this story. The only thing I got from this story was that it it was bad that the women could not do as she pleased and it was bad that her husband kept her shut up in the house all the time. She would be in the same room for months and months. I think that him keeping her in the same from for such long periods of time helped to contribute to her mental illness that i believe that she had. Overall I didn't really like this story at all.
I absolutely Loved this short story.It was my favorite of all the ones we read for this class.I really enjoyed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's development of the condition of the human psyche under confinement. The narrator obviously becomes more insane as the short story progresses. Her obsession with the yellow wallpaper in the room fascinates me. The way her mind interprets the pattern is amazing. Her perceptions as describe din her journal shows the reader that she is obviously not completely ok. I also think that the woman she sees in the patterns of the wallpaper is actually herself. This woman being trapped behind the wallpaper is symbolic of her being trapped in the house by her husband. As she tears down the wallpaper she sets free the woman as well as her mind. The last scene is my favorite scene of the story. Her crawling or "creeping" around the room paints a very creepy picture in my mind.
It is immediately apparent in the story that the woman allows herself to be inferior to men, particularly her husband, John. Being a physician, he has special orders for her, to stay in bed, suppress her imagination, and most importantly to discontinue her writing. Though she feels better when she writes, and feels it may be beneficial, she does not say a word.
11 comments:
The fact that the woman couldn't do as she pleased kind of made me angry. She was kept on such a short leash by her husband John, and when he wasn't there she was watched so closely by Jennie. With a nervous condition, it doesn't help to stay inside in the same room for months, athough this was John's thinking. As a physician, John thought he was right about what was best to make his wife better, but I don't know if he was really trying to do what was best for her. It kind of seemed to me that he was kind of testing her to see how much she could take before she cracked. She should've been allowed to go outside and enjoy the outside world, not just an awful yellow room. It is clear as the woman continues to write that the longer she stays in that yellow room, her health decreased. I think the end of the story showed how cooped up and trapped the woman felt by "becoming" the woman who was trapped behind the wallpaper.
Wow, what an intriguing story this was! I thought it was neat and at the same time kind of scary to “crawl” into the mind of a person who had a mental illness. From what I read of the story, I think the woman either had a child and lost it and that caused her illness, or she was taken away from it because of her illness. Either way, going away to be alone and think about what she had lost just made it worse. She stayed in the nursery because she missed her child and I believe that dwelling on her baby was a major part of the problem. I don’t know if the husband took her out to the country just to improve her health or to hide her from society because he was a prominent member in the town as a physician. Maybe having a mentally ill wife would have been bad for his reputation, or maybe he sincerely cared about her well-being. Also, could the woman behind the wallpaper symbolize her being trapped in her own mind and grief? I’m not sure what yellow signifies, though. I can’t wait to discuss it in class!
After reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the only thing my mind could think of was “Oh my God, I think I am going to be sick”. Being put in the shoes of a patient who is mentally ill was quite positively nerve-racking. The main character in this story, a woman with her fare share of issues, has been diagnosed with a temporary nervous depression. It is obvious that the woman is suffering from some dramatic departure from a child. Although my opinion of this story is not favorable, as shown by society when it was first released, Gilman did in fact do a fantastic job of getting his point across. He wrote this passage for individual readers to prevent themselves from being driven absolutely mad. I must be honest and say that I did not enjoy the reading but it was in fact mind-opening and a beneficial experience to say the least. Hopefully Gilman has some other short stories that I can read so I can begin to understand his writings.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a little disturbing. I mean disturbing in a way that I felt sorry for the woman. This woman obviously was closed up in her house by her husband for far too long. Her husband, John, told her that she was sick with a nervous depression. Although John is a physician, I don’t believe he gave a correct diagnosis in making his wife stay inside all the time. I think that by keeping the woman in the house all the time, it made her go crazy. I think that her fascination with the details of the house and the garden just showed characteristics of her being female. Maybe one of her biggest desires was to be outside and plant in the garden, but she wasn’t allowed to. I got the feeling that the woman “in the wallpaper” was her, as if she wanted to come out of the controlled and closed life that she always lived in. At the end of the story it proved that the woman had gone completely crazy. The story all together is quite depressing and it made me feel sorry for the life the woman had to live.
I really liked this story. It shows how hard things were for people with mental illnesses during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The narrator wasn’t even that bad off to start with and she was kept in a room she hated and feared for months, I can’t even imagine how the really bad off patients were treated. Her husband not only didn’t let her do anything to get her mind off things, such as writing, but he also criticized her fears. He wouldn’t allow her to move to a different room because he wanted to be near her so he could keep an eye on her at night She didn’t want to be in the room in the first place because of the yellow wallpaper and eventually that’s what drove her crazy. She began to see a woman crawling behind the bar pattern on the wallpaper, trying to get out. She eventually tears as much of the wallpaper as she can off the walls, believing herself to be the woman she saw, so that they can’t put her back into the wallpaper.
I really liked reading this story a lot, but there were certain parts of it that confused me. I couldn't really decide if the ending of the story was tragic or triumphant for the woman. In some ways I thought it was really tragic because she obviously goes crazy due to whatever psychological problems she has and the fact that she has been confined for so long. However, at the same time I saw some triumph in the end because she takes down all the wallpaper and "frees" the woman behind it (which I thought might represent herself). So even though she has gone a little crazy, she has escaped her husband's control and exposed one of his weaknesses creating some kind of personal identity for herself.
This shows how much the medical treatment for women have changed over this past few hundred years. In the past doctors such as her husband and brother or Silas Mitchell would prescribe a “Rest cure.” Its kind of funny how they seriously thought doing absolutely nothing for half a year or even longer could make someone better. It just doesn’t even make sense. How could locking someone away for months away from the rest of the world in a secluded country estate make them get over depression? Today we realize that it takes interaction with other people to get over things such as this. You can’t really blame her husband or brother because they were only doing what they thought was best for her. It was part of the medical practices of their time and were only following what their predecessors before them said.
There is a poem by Eric Victorino that talks about how society accepts that doctors prescribing pills for everything, and that it shouldnt be that way and i wanted to share:
drug commercials on the television (rev.)
taken from the book COMA THERAPY
we take pills for everything.
got a terrible case of
social anxiety?
depression?
no problem, we’ve got a pill for that.
you need medical attention
these are
serious afflictions-
luck of the draw was
so very unkind to you.
can't be caused by your upbringing...
no.
not your weaknesses
or your under-developed
communication skills,
they have nothing to do with your inability
to cope.
it's not your diet,
it’s not your lack of exercise -
it can't be the fluorescent lighting
in your drab little cubicle...
it isn't your unwillingness
to improve your surroundings,
your shitty situation.
you never make friends...
you never take chances...
or a vacation...
you never take
a fucking second to breathe.
your symptoms
couldn't possibly
have anything to do with
giving up on love,
giving up on life,
giving up on your dreams,
giving up on yourself...
no, it's not your fault.
it never is.
it's a chemical imbalance.
it's your misfiring neuron receptors!
see our ad in LIFE magazine!
oh look,
there's a cute little cartoon character
bouncing around on the TV screen
telling you you're depressed
and Zoloft is the only answer.
salvation is now available
in easy-to-swallow-caplets…
a narrator adds
in a trustworthy, comforting tone:
"fixing the causes of your disease?
fuck that!
let’s focus on the symptoms!
swallow this…
side effects may include but
are not limited to:
diarrhea, constipation,
feelings of inadequacy,
vomiting, headache,
muscle aches, upset stomach,
runny nose, high blood pressure,
low blood pressure, severe depression,
recurring thoughts of death and suicide,
erections lasting more than
four to six hours..."
you’re so very fucked up but
we've got the cure!
we’ve got just the magic feather for you
in any color you choose…
take the newest,
the best,
the strongest brand-name-brain fuckers.
numb, numb, numb enough...
to be sure you're able
to cope with the miserable life
you've been stumbling through.
just enough pills to be sure
you forget about the time you've wasted,
forget about the potential you once had
numb enough to
get back to work.
so where'd that dream you had go?
what was your first love's name?
what did you want to be
once you were all grown up?
what did you end up with?
I know, it must hurt
to have grown up so
full of promise, so bright with dreams,
so full of the lie.
what do you want to be,
little guy, when you grow up?
astronaut, movie star, doctor?
too bad. BOOM!
tax attorney.
BOOM!
shift manager.
taxi driver.
counter clerk.
delivery driver.
software engineer.
bartender.
customer service representative...
for that pain,
that deep, dull heart ache...
more and more pills.
I wonder
if doctors will ever start to prescribe
ambition, goals, creativity-
paintbrushes,
pens and blank journals
a lump of soft clay,
anything
before resorting to the pills…
pills for the disease
pills for the pain of
growing up full of such
vibrant, colorful dreams-
only to watch them
fade away
eventually replaced with
dull beige and grays.
for that
depressing reality.
more and more
pills.
I found this short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", my least favorite of all the short stories because for me this one was the hardest to understand. I have always had a hard time understanding literature but most of the time I could figure out enough to be able to understand what was going on in the story. But this was not the case in this story. The only thing I got from this story was that it it was bad that the women could not do as she pleased and it was bad that her husband kept her shut up in the house all the time. She would be in the same room for months and months. I think that him keeping her in the same from for such long periods of time helped to contribute to her mental illness that i believe that she had. Overall I didn't really like this story at all.
I absolutely Loved this short story.It was my favorite of all the ones we read for this class.I really enjoyed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's development of the condition of the human psyche under confinement. The narrator obviously becomes more insane as the short story progresses. Her obsession with the yellow wallpaper in the room fascinates me. The way her mind interprets the pattern is amazing. Her perceptions as describe din her journal shows the reader that she is obviously not completely ok.
I also think that the woman she sees in the patterns of the wallpaper is actually herself. This woman being trapped behind the wallpaper is symbolic of her being trapped in the house by her husband. As she tears down the wallpaper she sets free the woman as well as her mind.
The last scene is my favorite scene of the story. Her crawling or "creeping" around the room paints a very creepy picture in my mind.
It is immediately apparent in the story that the woman allows herself to be inferior to men, particularly her husband, John. Being a physician, he has special orders for her, to stay in bed, suppress her imagination, and most importantly to discontinue her writing. Though she feels better when she writes, and feels it may be beneficial, she does not say a word.
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