Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. An analysis
Nonfiction, Entertainment, Drama, Anthologies
| Author: | Verena Schörkhuber | ISBN: | 9783640174454 |
| Publisher: | GRIN Verlag | Publication: | September 23, 2008 |
| Imprint: | GRIN Verlag | Language: | English |
| Author: | Verena Schörkhuber |
| ISBN: | 9783640174454 |
| Publisher: | GRIN Verlag |
| Publication: | September 23, 2008 |
| Imprint: | GRIN Verlag |
| Language: | English |
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts, 40 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) - a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a 'transformed autobiography' (Shulman, xix), as a 'journalistic/clinical account of a woman's gradual descent into madness' (Bak, 39), and in multiple ways as a 'critique of gender relations' (Shulman, xix). It is a 'bitter story', as Ann J. Lane describes it, 'of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell's 'rest cure'' (Lane, vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a 'temporary nervous depression' (W, 4), which is today known as 'postpartum depression', that is, a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself, following the birth of her first child, became 'a mental wreck' in need of a 'rest cure', 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a fictionalized account of Gilman's own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell, whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women .
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts, 40 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) - a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a 'transformed autobiography' (Shulman, xix), as a 'journalistic/clinical account of a woman's gradual descent into madness' (Bak, 39), and in multiple ways as a 'critique of gender relations' (Shulman, xix). It is a 'bitter story', as Ann J. Lane describes it, 'of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell's 'rest cure'' (Lane, vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a 'temporary nervous depression' (W, 4), which is today known as 'postpartum depression', that is, a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself, following the birth of her first child, became 'a mental wreck' in need of a 'rest cure', 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a fictionalized account of Gilman's own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell, whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women .
