Escape Through Dementia in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gi

Escape Through Dementia in The sensationalistic Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-paper is an excellent story on several levels. It working as a suspenseful thriller close the effects of mental illness. It excessively serves to make several points about feminism and the pervailing attitudes of her time. John, the husband, serves as a metaphor for masculine views of the time, and for the masculine side of humans, the side of reason and logic. John is working in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horor of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things non to be felt and seen and dictate down in figures (1658). His character is almost stereotypical in its shackle to reason and its attittude towards his wife. He negates her intuition there is something strange about the erect - I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window (1658) He attributes her nail do wn to a slight hysterical tendency (1658), which is, etymologically speaking, just a polite personal manner of saying that she is instable due to being a woman. He is not fire in his wifes actual condition, rather in his diagnosis John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him (1659). His best advice is to not use her imagination (though trapped in an ugly room), but to become more just and to resist her condition through willpower. When he does put her to cope and asks her to get well, he asks, not for her own self, but with him as the motivation He said . . . that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well (1663). John is reasonable and educated. He represents a stifling pr... ...eedom from the bars in the pattern. This creeping about is certainly at odds with her husbands requests. It is irrational, in that she thinks she has escaped, when it is actually time to take for good, and she has locked herse lf in. She defies his orders of bed rest, physically exhausting herself crawling about and pushing the bed and biting the bed and tearing the wall-paper. She overcomes her husbands forthright sensibility by playing so crazy that he cannot deny it, cannot make sense of it, cannot do anything but faint away, leaving her to crawl right over the nobble of him. She has escaped his oppression by going into her dementia and embracing it. kit and boodle Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-paper. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eds. Nina Baym, et. al. Shorter 5th ed. New York, London W.W. Norton & Company, 1999 1656-1669.