Escape Through Dementia in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gi

Escape done Dementia in The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-paper is an excellent falsehood on several levels. It works as a suspenseful thriller somewhat the effects of mental illness. It also serves to make several points about feminist movement and the pervailing attitudes of her time. John, the husband, serves as a metaphor for masculine views of the time, and for the masculine gradient of humans, the side of reason and logic. John is practical in the extreme. He has no industry with faith, an intense horor of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things non to be felt and seen and put down in figures (1658). His character is near stereotypical in its adherence to reason and its attittude towards his wife. He negates her intuition in that respect is something strange about the ho purpose - I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, provided he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the windowpane (1658) He att ributes her condition to a slight hysterical tendency (1658), which is, etymologically speaking, that a polite way of saying that she is instable due to being a woman. He is not interested in his wifes actual condition, rather in his diagnosis John does not know how much I rattling 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 reasonable and to resist her condition through willpower. When he does put her to stern and asks her to get well, he asks, not for her own self, but with him as the want He said . . . that I must take care of myself for his sake, and victuals well (1663). John is reasonable and educated. He represents a stifling pr... ...eedom from the forbid 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 leave for good, and she has locked herself in. She defies his orders of bed rest, physically exhausting herself weirdo about and pushing the bed and biting the bed and tearing the wall-paper. She overcomes her husbands stark(a) sensibility by acting so crazy that he cannot repudiate it, cannot make sense of it, cannot do anything but faint away, leaving her to crawling right over the top of him. She has escaped his oppression by going into her dementia and embracing it. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-paper. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eds. Nina Baym, et. al. Shorter 5th ed. in the altogether York, London W.W. Norton & Company, 1999 1656-1669.