The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay

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Beyond The Wallpaper
In our world, we have a constant struggle for power, one group trying to remind while another attempts to gain. One instance is the gender divide—a sum of the differences between the equality of men and women. This is an age where we have the ability to do the unthinkable with science, see the imaginary with arts, live longer and healthier with medicine, but we still oppress half of our population because of what resides between their legs. The major problem in correcting this issue is that most of the members in the stronger half do not recognize their privilege, they do not see that the way we live keeps our other half down. Charlotte Perkins Gilman took it upon herself to show this to the world. Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” illuminates the oppression of women along with the struggles of mental health patients through the experiences of the author as portrayed by the protagonist-narrator; as such, a biographical approach (along with an analysis of the text) will be taken. Gilman’s life becomes the gothic tale of a woman diagnosed with a mental …show more content…
The narrator writes as if the story is a diary, using first person. It is almost as if Gilman herself is talking to us. The diary-style writing helps us to connect with the protagonist, to see the world through her eyes. In KV Rao’s analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, for simplicity’s sake he goes as far as naming the narrator Charlotte—directly connecting to the author rather than using the proxy of the protagonist (Rao 39). He goes on to quote Elaine Hedges in describing her writing (in what I can only say is spot on): “…The curt, chopped sentences, the brevity of the paragraphs, which often consist of only one or two sentences, convey the taut distraught mental state of the narrator” (qtd. in Rao 40). You can trace her mental decline, line by line, as she descends into

The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay

An Analysis of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by the female American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. First published in 1892, it was created at a time of transformation in the history of the United States and is considered a feminist text. The fiction is presented in the first person as a collection of diaries written by the depressed wife(the narrator, protagonist), whose physician husband (John, antagonist) has confined her to a summer…

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