Preview

Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
478 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper
A mental illness is any kind of mental health condition or disorder. Mental illnesses affect mood, thinking, and behavior. A mental illness affects a character and the people close to them. It affects a character by causing sadness and disabling the things that the character is able to do. It affects the people close to them because others have to take care of them. A huge way that a mental illness affects a character is by causing sadness. Mental illnesses defiantly cause sadness to the character. For some mental illnesses like depression, sadness is what the mental illness is. Others also cause the character to be sad though. For example, a quote from the story is, "I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time"(Stetson 650). Crying most of the time implies that the character from "The Yellow Wall Paper" is sad most of the time. It seems like she's really lonely since she is by herself most of the time. Besides causing a character to constantly be sad, some mental illnesses disable what a character can do. …show more content…
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" it seems like what the character can do is limited because all she does is lay around all day and look closely at the wall paper and all of the things in the room that she stays in. The text says, "lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did go together or separately"(Stetson 653). It seems like all that it talks about her doing is laying around and paying close attention to the detail of something in her room. That is another example of how a mental illness can affect someone. But not only does a mental illness affect the character, it also affects the people close to

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a story around the narrator who is suffering from mental illness, which is internal. The narrator begins to explain how she knows something is wrong with her even though her high standing physician husband, John, and high standing physician brother don’t see anything except a temporary depression. John takes the narrator to a house over the summer to get her away from people and society, because John believes it makes her think of her condition, which is the worse thing the narrator should do. The narrator then explains the house as “the most beautiful place!” (Gilman, 552), the description is very personified and creates a bright, visible image in the readers’ head. The description…

    • 269 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Psy/270 Mind over Matter

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Mental illness is a health condition that affects a person’s thoughts, behavior, and emotions (in some cases all three) which in turns affects the person’s ability to function in their daily lives. Insanity (used as a legal term) is an individual who is diagnosed with a mental illness, unable to know right from wrong, and is unable to function accordingly.…

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the semester, we have read many texts that deal with the topic of mental illness and stability. Interestingly, the characters who exemplify these problems are virtually all women. In Carrianne K.Y. Leung’s The Wondrous Woo mental illness and mental episodes affect nearly all the female characters in the text. Some mental illnesses are dealt with more heavily than others, while many are hinted at, but never fully developed. We see Miramar struggle with eating disorders and mental health, Sophia lies to make her life more appealing, and the mother struggles with the most severe cases of metal episodes and is hospitalized for it. Interestingly, we see this occurrence of the mother in the hospital in Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place…

    • 255 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    According to Merriam-Webster, depression is defined as a serious medical condition in which a person feels sad, hopeless, and unimportant and often is unable to live in a normal way. Oftentimes authors use their creative abilities to incorporate worldwide realities, like depression, in order to connect more closely with readers. An example of this is in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the author uses symbolism to explore a deeper meaning into mental illness. A specific section in this story that focuses on this appears on the last page where the unnamed narrator describes all the creeping women outside who escaped from the wallpaper like she did. She wonders how they creep so fast, comparing their impaired brains to hers. “In Charlotte Gilman’s…

    • 148 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator has psychological repression since her husband does not listen to her thoughts and insists on the rest cure. The psychologist, Sigmund Freud, theorized three components of mind which really incorporates on the protagonist. I can analyze the narrator in two stages: when she is conscious at the beginning, she thinks she cannot persuade her husband that "congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good", so she writes hopelessly "But what is one to do?" and obeys her husband unwillingly; when she is unconscious, the narrator imagines that there is a forbidden woman in the yellow wallpaper, then she tears the wallpaper insanely and escapes the maison with the imaginary woman.…

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is truly insane from the very beginning of the story; she just falls deeper and deeper into insanity as the story progresses. In the beginning of the story she tells of how her husband diagnoses her insanity, "a slight hysterical tendency,"(633). Later in the story she admits her own condition, "I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes…I think it is due to this nervous condition."(634). John, her husband, makes her stay in bed and rest through the story; this contributes to her gradual slide into complete insanity. She begins to show signs of her schizophrenia. She sits in her room starring at the walls and begins to envision people stuck behind the wallpaper.…

    • 354 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As Thomas More once said, “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.” Charlotte Stetson understood this when writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but the main question she had probably was: “How do I convey to the reader my character's insanity?” There are many definitions of insanity. However, what makes “The Yellow Wallpaper” appealing to the reader is its ability to create the experience of it. At first glance, the story expresses the protagonist's insanity through the seemingly incoherent plot. Yet when taking a closer look, Stetson uses literary devices, such as setting and metaphors, to evoke emotion in the reader. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Stetson sets an unsettling definition of character for the protagonist through literary devices like setting and metaphors.…

    • 616 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Mental Health can be described as a person’s sense of psychological wellbeing. It is the capacity to live in a resourceful and fulfilling manner, and having the resilience to deal with the challenges and obstacles life presents. (What is mental health?, 2006) A mental illness or problem is a health problem that significantly affects the way a person behaves, thinks and feels. Mental illnesses are of many different types and severity. Some of the major types are: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, bipolar mood disorder, schizophrenia, and personality disorders. Some of the causes, or risk factors, of…

    • 2302 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the female protagonist veers from the majority of patriarchal societies because of her distinct feelings of frustration, alienation, and emotional and creative repression within this social formation. Ultimately, in order to escape this early twentieth century state of mind, the female protagonist goes insane. However tragic this may appear on the surface, the suggestion of deliverance from her restricted environment is one of freedom of the dominant culture. Although the narrator escapes the narrow restraints of mentality through insanity, the underlying themes of The Yellow Wallpaper help to shed light on the narrators’ delirium.…

    • 1512 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mental Illness is when your thoughts feelings and behavior have a negative impact on your life. Everyone known mental illness exist but are uncomfortable about the fact it can be happening right in front of them. People who struggle with mental illness to get the help they need. Depression A serious medical condition in which a person feel very sad, hopeless and unimportant and often is unable to live in a normal way. Depression effort about one and four people.in American. Elizabeth Medina is a pageant queen who is studying pre-med and science major. She explains how depression tried to take over her life. Grown up in a Dominican family. She gives three main reason how depression started building up in her life. But at the end…

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    When someone uses the word “insanity,” the human mind may potentially go many in many different directions when defining it. One person may claim that the definition is “doing something over and over again and expecting a different result,” however, many other people believe in using the words “crazy” or “mad” to associate with insanity. Insanity is many things, but overall, it is something that affects the human body and mind in horrid, terrifying ways over a period of time. What causes insanity? The main cause among mental instability and other causes, is isolation. Isolation can cause horrifying changes to the human body and mind and can cause a mediocre human being to go dashing into the embrace of insanity.…

    • 616 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The diagnoses, treatment, and overall understanding of mental illnesses have progressed greatly from when “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written. In those times the classification of a mental illness for a woman was madness. Women were treated accordingly, and not just by their doctors, but by their families and communities. Today, many facilities and medications exist to help individuals recover from a mental illness as best they can, and there are trained physicians and psychologists who can properly identify their illnesses. The only aspect that has not been completely altered since then is the way someone often reacts to another person’s mental illnesses. There are many people today who would treat someone with depression, nearly the same way John, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, treated his wife, who had postpartum depression. That would be to firstly deny there is even a problem, and then try and conceal it out of embarrassment from family and friends.…

    • 1178 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    To define mental illness as an illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions — disorders that affect your mood, thinking, and behavior. All of these can cause someone or something to be very violent. For example, the narrator and antagonist of this story “Tell-Tale Heart” has a very severe case of mental illness which causes him to be violent “I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage” the old man was cut up into pieces and was very dead (Poe, 66). In addition, the narrator of the story still heard the sound of the old man’s heartbeat which caused him to terminate the old man “With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once --once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This,…

    • 449 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Having a serious mental illness can limit one’s freedom. The person may want to be free, but the illness will not let them. Consuming everything about the persons, sometimes making them unrecognizable to others. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman the main character goes through the process of losing herself to her illness. While her husband tries to treat her, he invalidates her feelings allowing her illness to progress. While at first the main character wants to be from the illness she ultimately succumbs to it. Deciding that the illness is her and she no longer wants to be free. Digger deeper into the The Yellow Wallpaper text one can argue main character is afraid of becoming her old self again.…

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Are mentally disordered offenders mad or bad? Many individuals can argue whether individuals are committing crimes due to their illness or if they are rotten individuals. This essay includes an overview of mental disorders, illness the difference between the two and also the provision for mentally disordered offenders. Furthermore, based on statistics found by research from various sources a summary concluding whether the argument is more towards mentally disabled offenders being mad or bad. When an individual has a mental disorder it’s defined as a change in the way they may act, feel and think; it would affect his daily activities.…

    • 1717 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays