Isolation In Jane Eyre

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Within Gilman’s work, there are underlying feminist views on freedom from patriarchal isolation, but there are also implications of how to treat and diagnose psychiatric disorders. Though John may have had good intentions in mind while caring for his wife, a reader can not help but question his tactics. The choice of room, in particular, is quite odd. The room is a decrepit nursery that is locked from the outside, floors with gashes and claw marks, and a bed nailed to the floor that has been gnawed on. Despite this, Jane’s treatment of isolation and bedrest is depicted as less than horrific in comparison to Bertha Mason’s in Jane Eyre. Probably, due to the extent of duration in comparison to Bertha’s entrapment in the attic. The mental stability of Jane at the ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is similar to Bertha’s, yet there is a high possibility that Bertha’s mental stability is due not only to isolation and treatments but a probable underlying undiagnosed psychological disorder. Both Jane and Bertha’s level of sanity is described as animalistic. Jane is depicted as creeping throughout the nursery while clawing at the wallpaper, and Bertha is bluntly …show more content…
Aforementioned, physicians utilized pelvic massage in achieving hysterical paroxysm as a treatment of hysteria in women. Hysterical paroxysm is not mentioned in either works directly but it was common practice at the time. Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason is indirectly mentioned as a showing promiscuous and animalistic tendencies: “. . . the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste” (Brontë 311) and as “a bad, mad, and embruted partner” (297). Nevertheless, paroxysm is mentioned in direct relation to the care of