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Yellow Wallpaper

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Yellow Wallpaper
Matt Schreurs
10/9/2012
English 110
Prof. Lund
Paranoid Paper When a person is locked up for to long with no social interaction, insanity is likely to arise. The Yellow Wallpaper points out a crucial point about how women were treated back in the 1900’s. In the 1900’s women were often forbidden to work by men and diagnosed with temporary nervous depression (Wikipedia, 10). When a woman was diagnosed with the disorder they were often locked up or isolated (Wikipedia, 10). Men had an abundance of power back then. John had forced his wife to be locked upstairs in their home and ordered that she be socially isolated. . It seems John doesn’t do anything to help his wife out which leads us to wonder what role did John have in his wife going insane? John was the main and whole reason for her being sucked into insanity. He did this by locking her in a room secluded from the world and refused to listen to her comments and didn’t allow her to have any emotional release John is the very reason that his wife went insane, but he pretends that he is doing the right thing to help her. When John decided to lock her in the nursery upstairs she began to go insane. John sensed that something was wrong with his wife and decided if he couldn’t fix her then the best alternative was to socially isolate her. Her husband is constantly telling her lies to make him feel better about her and so she won’t go entirely insane. Even though she realizes that the environment needs to be changed in order for her to get better John wont listen to her because he feels that she is not rational and that she is just trying to fancy herself. This infuriates her and starts to make her depressed, which throws her farther into insanity. Social isolation was a very commonly used therapy method back in the 1900’s. This method was used when a man felt that his wife was becoming irrational or having a nervous depression (Ruth, 14). This was only used for women, and it was common for a woman to be

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