Creating Madness in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpaper essays

As summer progresses in the story The scandalmongering Wallpaper, Johns treatment of the narrator as though she were a helpless docile child becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy she sheds the skin of her full-grown self and gives birth to her inner child via the wallpaper. From the moment she implies she is sick, his behavior becomes much and more parental and authoritarian. Under this guise he slowly disintegrates each resemblance of an adult wife he had. At the end hes rejoicing because he does beget a child. Simultaneously, hes a loser because the behavior of this puerile being mirrors his own attitude toward his wife shes defiant and assertive and runs adept everyplace him. The tables have reversed. In the beginning of the story, John laughs at her feelings intimately the queerness of the estate he has rented for the next three months. He acts as if her imagination has gone wild. Clearly he does not see her as his equal but as an undeveloped being who would entertain suc h nonsense. John has no patience with faith and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen (Gilman 178). John does not have the patience to deal with a lesser beings outlook. It takes a dandy deal of patience for a parent to deal with the inner whole works of a childs imaginative mind. John and his brother-in-law, both physicians, refuse to cogitate she is actually sick. Instead they assume she has a slight hysterical tendency (178). In their eyes depression is not an illness but a emblem of being a female. John has forbidden her to work (179). Very often parents dont believe children when they say they are sick. Adults think that children blow things out of proportion in order to get their parents attention. His prescription for... ...his infantile creation had to creep over him (191) as she escapes from the womb of the wallpaper. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte P. The Yellow Wallpaper. An Introduction to Literature. Ed. Sylvan Barnett, Morton Berman, and William Burton tenth ed. New York Harper Collins, 1993. 178-91. Golden, Catharine. The Writing of The Yellow Wallpaper A Double Palimset. Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1989) 193-201. Hume, Beverly A. Gilmans Interminable Grotesque The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 28 (1991) 477-83. Johnson, Gregg. Gilmans Gothic Allegory bodge and Re-demption in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989) 521-30. King, Jeanette, and Pam Morris. On Not Reading Between The Lines Models of Reading in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989) 23-32.