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Summary The Yellow wallpaper - FULLY typed notes
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Character analysis, context, critical analysis, themes of the yellow wallpaper. The FULL notes that helped me achieve an A* in my exam.
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Context TYPhttps://www.sparknotes.com/lit/yellowwallpaper/context/
-Gilman was best known as crusading journalist and feminist intellectual.
Followed pioneering women’s rights advocates (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
-Gilman argued women’s obligation to remain in domestic sphere robbed women of creativity &
intelligence
whilst robbing society of women’s abilities that may have suited them
-power structure of family made NOONE happy
-Women and Economics (1898) analysed hidden value of women’s labour within a capitalist society
& argued financial independence in women would benefit whole society
-TYP considered unprintably shocking in its time
shock work of fiction dealing with (unequal marriage/women destroyed by unfulfillment
-1886 early in 1st marriage & not long after birth of daughter dealing with severe depression
-1935 autobiography ‘The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’
describes her “utter prostrations” by “unbearable inner misery” and “ceaseless tears”
condition only made worse by husband & baby
Referred to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (leading specialist for nervous disorders)
treatment “rest cure” of forced inactivity
-Mitchell believed that depression in females was brought on by not enough attention to domestic
affairs
-For Gilman this treatment caused disasted
prevented from working, nervous breakdown
reduced to crawling into closets/under bed & clutching rag doll
-Once abandoned rest cure // condition improved claimed to feel effects of ordeal for rest of life
-Leaving behind husband & child Charlotte took the name ‘Gilman’
& embarked on career as journalist/lecturer/publisher
-wrote TYP after move to California & uses personal experience
-narrative of the fate of creative women stifled by a paternalistic culture
-In literary terms TYP looks back to tradition of psychological horror tale as practised by Edgar Allan
Poe
e.g. Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ told from POV of insane narrator
-Gilman draws on tradition of gothic romances of later 18 th cent
e.g. spooky mansions & young heroines determined to uncover secrets
-story is also forward-looking
moment-by-moment reporting narrator’s thoughts move to direction of stream-of-consciousness
narration used by 20th century writers e.g. Virginia Woolf/James Joyce
, The Yellow wallpaper – Character analysis
Narrator
-Young, middle-class woman
-a new mother who is struggling w/ mental health issues
-her entire character is a paradox loses touch with outer world whilst coming to a greater
understanding of inner reality of life.
-Depicts character’s suffering
-faced with relationship/objects/situations seeming innocent & natural yet bizarre &
oppressive.
-Narrator imaginative & highly expressive
e.g. remembers nighttime monsters & enjoys idea house is haunted
-‘cure’ is to not use imagination
-Imagination into neutral objects (rebelling against treatment)
-deeper into imagination = dissociation from day-to-day life
-Dissociation begins when reader starts reading as “a relief of her mind.”
-Gilman shows division of narrator’s consciousness by having narrator puzzle over effects in
world that SHE caused.
e.g. doesn’t understand yellow stains on clothing & wallpaper are connected
-Begins to identify w/ woman trapped in wallpaper
see other women are forced to creep behind domestic patterns of lives. (she needs to be
rescued)
-Horror of story narrator must lose herself to understand herself.
-END of story reveals sacrifice
“I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane.”
Some critics state ‘Jane’ misprint for ‘Jennie’
However some say ‘Jane’ is the narrator (becoming a stranger to herself)
John (metaphor for patriarchy)
-Narrators husband & physician
-seems to be ‘obvious’ villain however story doesn’t show him as wholly evil
-appears he wanted to help narrator.
-character depicts all-encompassing authority through husband & doctor
-disregards Narrator’s opinion (forces her to hide her true feelings)
&patronises her
-dry/clinical/rationality unsuited to understand wide
-ignorance = danger
-knows his wife superficially
-care for wife however the unequal relationship stops him truly understanding
-treating as “case”/”wife” depersonalises her & gives her no will destroys her
-John is inevitably destroyed by imprisoning relationship
-John faints in shop and goes unrecognised by wife
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