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Today I had the great chance to create this blog where I'm going to share my emotions with you about an interesting story. This is the first time when I do such a work. I've never done this before. I'm so excited. Hope you'll enjoy it :) 

I will be able to make stylistic analysis of the English short story 

           "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

My expectations of the story

While reading the description of the story I found that it is not simple and very exciting. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was best known in her time as a crusading journalist and feminist intellectual, a follower of such pioneering women’s rights advocates as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman’s great-aunt. Gilman was concerned with political inequality and social justice in general, but the primary focus of her writing was the unequal status of women within the institution of marriage. In such works as Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1904), and Human Work (1904), Gilman argued that women’s obligation to remain in the domestic sphere robbed them of the expression of their full powers of creativity and intelligence, while simultaneously robbing society of women whose abilities suited them for professional and public life. 

The Yellow Wallpaper is a semi-autobiographical short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which she describes the treatment of women during a rest cure prescribed for nervous disorders by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who was a famous physician. The story describes the submissive, childlike obedience of women to male authority figures that was considered typical at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The unnamed protagonist of the story is helpless to express her own needs. She is taken by her husband, John, to a country house so that she can recuperate from a nervous condition. The reader is immediately aware of the condescending attitude of the physician husband toward his wife. She is relegated against her will to a third floor room of the house, a room that the owners previously used as a nursery. Symbolically, the room with the yellow wallpaper serves as a prison where the wife is restricted, like a child, from the intellectual activities of reading and writing. At first, the narrator rebels against the constraints by keeping a secret diary. When John discovers her disobedience, she is chastised and her diary is cruelly destroyed.

Reading the story for the first time

When I was reading the story for the first time I realized that all my expectations were true...

The story’s climactic scene occurs as their stay in the rented house is coming to a close. On their last night, John is once again in town attending to a patient, and the narrator asks Jennie not to disturb her. Left alone, the narrator locks herself in the nursery to allow uninterrupted time for peeling wallpaper and thus freeing the shadowy woman. As the narrator works, she identifies more closely and intensely with the trapped woman until, ultimately, she loses her sense of individual identity and merges with the woman behind the wallpaper. John breaks down the door to find his wife crawling amid the torn paper, proclaiming that she is free at last, and no one can put her back behind the wallpaper. John faints, and his wife continues her creeping over his fallen body.

About the author

The story which I have chosen to analyse is "The Yellow Wall-Paper" written by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

She was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story, first published in January 1892 in The New English Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.In her own words, Gilman wrote: "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." It is presented in the first person.

The Plot of the Story

The structure of "The Yellow Wallpaper" creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy. The story is written in a journal-style, first-person narrative which includes nine short entries, each entry indicated by a small space between it and the last. The journal entries span three months during which John attempts to cure his wife’s “nervous condition” through the rest cure of Weir Mitchell, which assumes that intellectual stimulation damages a woman physically and psychologically. In the beginning of the story, the narrator appears sane and believable, but as the story continues, the reader realizes that she is unreliable because she withholds and confuses information. By the end, the structure—short paragraphs, fragmented and disjointed thought patterns— reflects the narrator’s mental disorder. Through the revelations contained in the journal, the reader is allowed an intimate view of the narrator’s gradual mental breakdown.

The journal begins when John and the narrator move into a temporary home John has procured to provide the narrator the break from routine that he believes necessary for her rest and recovery. She, on the other hand, doubts the necessity of such a move and wonders if the mysterious house is haunted. John reveals his superior attitude toward his wife by laughing at her “fancies,” a response which the narrator finds quite natural because, as she explains, one must expect such treatment in marriage. She even suggests that his indifference to her opinions on the house and her illness keeps her from getting well faster. Her suggestion turns out to be a fateful prediction.

Against her wishes, John decides that he and his wife will sleep in the attic room of the house, which at one point may have been a nursery. Actually, the room seems to be more of a prison than a place for children to play. The windows have bars on them, and the bed is nailed to the floor. There is even a gate at the top of the stairs. Even more disturbing to the narrator, however, is the yellow wallpaper, peeling or pulled off the walls in strips. In the beginning, the paper’s pattern jolts and annoys the narrator’s sensibilities, but later her attitude has a bizarre change.

The narrator’s morbid fascination with the yellow wallpaper is the first clue of her degenerating sanity. She begins to attribute lifelike characteristics to the paper, saying that it knows how it affects her and that its eyes stare at her. She even begins to believe that the paper has two levels, a front pattern and a shadowy figure trapped behind its bars. The narrator betrays the progression of her illness when she begins to believe that the figure behind the wallpaper is a woman, trapped like herself.

The woman behind the wallpaper becomes an obsession. The narrator begins to crawl, like the woman behind the paper, around the edge of the room, making a groove or “smooch” on the wall. The narrator begins to catch glimpses of the woman out the windows, creeping around the garden on her hands and knees. She also starts peeling off the wallpaper in an effort to completely free the woman (or women, as she soon believes) trapped in that second layer. John and his sister, Jennie, begin to suspect that something is terribly wrong, and yet they are pleased with her apparent progress. She appears more normal to them at times because she is saving her energy for nighttime, when the woman behind the paper is most active. Her apparent normality is merely a façade.

The Yellow Wallpaper Characters

The narrator

The narrator, unnamed, who also is the protagonist. She is an imaginative, creative woman living in a society that views women who exhibit artistic and intellectual potential as anomalies, misfits, or, as in this story, ill. The narrator, having recently borne a child, apparently suffers from an ailment now identified as postpartum depression. Her husband, John, who is a doctor, misidentifies her condition and prescribes a “rest cure” made popular by the well-respected physician Weir Mitchell. The rest cure assumes that intellectual stimulation damages a woman physically and psychologically, so John requires the narrator to stop all writing, all reading, and essentially, all higher-level thinking. The narrator, however, cannot deny her creative imagination, so she writes in secret the document that is the novella, through which readers can trace the harmful psychological effects of the rest cure. She develops a fascination with the yellow wallpaper in their room. Her mental illness becomes more pronounced, until, finally, she openly displays madness.

John

John, the narrator’s husband, a physician. He differs from his imaginative wife in that he believes only in what he can see and touch. In his physical evaluation of his wife, he finds nothing wrong, so he believes she creates her own illness, that she is a hypochondriac. He enforces restrictions on his wife’s conduct in an attempt to end her disturbing behavior and cure her “nervous condition.” He seems to enjoy this control over her life, for his efforts extend far beyond limiting her intellectual stimulation. He chooses in which room she will live, whom she may see, and how she spends her time. He counters every desire his wife expresses with a measure keeping her from fulfilling her wish. He places himself in a superior, paternal position from which he denies the validity of the narrator’s perception of her own experiences and well-being. His medical practice keeps him away from home for sufficient time to allow the narrator to develop a subversive routine of writing and, eventually, obsessive rituals centered on the yellow wallpaper in their room.

Jennie

Jennie, John’s sister, who serves as housekeeper and helps John observe and limit the narrator’s behavior. Jennie appears bound by her brother’s concrete view of the world, though she is the only person in the story besides the narrator who actually looks at the wallpaper, seemingly in an attempt to understand the fascination it holds for the narrator. Although Jennie ultimately aligns herself with her more rational brother, her willingness to explore the possibility of irrational explanations for the narrator’s behavior makes her a slightly more sympathetic character than John.

Weir Mitchell

Weir Mitchell, the doctor who popularized the rest cure, only briefly referred to in the story but significant nevertheless. This character was not a literary invention but a real figure in the author’s life. In 1887, S. Weir Mitchell treated the author for a “nervous condition” at his Philadelphia sanatorium; the treatment was unsuccessful and harmful.

Stylistic Devices

This story uses many literary devices in order to be effective. Firstly, its narrative style is a first person stream on consciousness. This style makes the protagonist seem unbalanced, diluted, and confused.

   The story also contains several symbols. The yellow wallpaper itself symbolizes the psychological state of the narrator. The nursery is also a symbol of society's treatment of women as juveniles. The barred windows symbolize entrapment, or the prison of the room or mind.

   In The Yellow Wallpaper are:

1) Polysyndeton- this is what is termed as a scheme of repetition. It deliberately utilizes the repetition of many conjunctions:

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, andtonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.

Here, the author is pained by the complete insensitivity of her physician husband; he has marginalized her suffering by claiming that she is not sick at all. The use of many conjunctions signal her sense of despair and overwhelm at being inundated with remedies that she knows are useless in curing her present dilemma.

2) Anaphora- this is another scheme of repetition. It repeats beginning words or word phrases of successive clauses. It is a literary device that produces a strong emotional effect. Here, the author is pleading her own case.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don'tfeel able.

3) Parenthesis: this is a scheme of word order that veers from the traditional structure. Interjections of the author's voice appeal to our pity; we are given a glimpse into her mental suffering and emotional anguish. Below, we almost hear her desperation at being labeled 'hysterical.' She is also suspicious of the house and how her stay there will affect her.

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

4) Parallelism: this is a scheme of balance. It presents a similar structure in terms of phrasing and clause construction. It contributes to the rhythm in sentences and it also emphasizes similarities. This short story has many examples of parallelisms.

It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.

There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours.

   The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. (this is a tricolon, a type ofisocolon. Isocolons are a type of parallelism. Isocolons are not only similar in structure, they are also similar in length).

5) Epithets: “a delicious garden”, “sprawling flamboyant patterns”, “The colour…repellent, revolt…”, “a smouldering unclean yellow”, “atrocious nursery”, “blessed little goose”, “riotous old-fashioned flowers”, “velvet meadows'' (here epithets are used to make the description mo vivid)

6) Repetitions: “…perhaps -(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind -) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”,  “But he said I wasn't able to go, nor" able to stand it after I got there…” , “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.”, “Round and round and round -round and round and round -it makes me dizzy!” (these repetitions show us the constancy)