The Yellow Wallpaper Response Research Paper

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Kaitlyn Wallace Mrs. De la Garza English 1302 29 January, 2024 “The Yellow Wallpaper” Reader’s Response “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman’s descent into madness. The tale is set in the 1890s, which was a time before women’s suffrage when men, especially husbands, had a say over everything, including their wives and what they do. This is something that is explored in the passage. The story starts with the narrator and her husband moving into a new place for the summer. It is revealed that the narrator is struggling with “nervous depression” as her husband and doctor, John, describe. The rest of the passage we read as the woman slowly loses her mind. The work is written from a first-person perspective …show more content…
By writing the story from this point of view, we can understand (or attempt to understand) her mind as it starts to slip. If we were reading from say John’s perspective, we would get a story about a husband seeing his wife lose herself, and we would not get the background as to what is actually going on in her head. We instead get to experience her internal struggle as we go through the paragraphs. She talks about how the treatment she was giving wasn’t working, but that she had no choice in it. She becomes hyper-fixated on the wallpaper in her room because it is all she is given to focus on and we witness her internal struggle with the pattern. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions” (Gilman 236). The wallpaper is representative of the largest theme in this story, which is psychological crisis. The further the narrator starts to slip out of sanity, the more the wallpaper affects