Winning by Losing

“TheYellow Wallpaper”
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Explain the relationship between the narrator and her husband, John. How does this relationship affect the narrator?

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator tells us about a woman who goes into a rest cure as prescribed by her husband John, a physician. Her relationship with John is almost an endurance of un-being. She is not supposed to express herself in any form. Throughout the story, the narrator pauses by hiding her notebook from her husband. The rest cure as applied here is worse than the illness and brings about her descend into madness. The confinement of her body wouldn’t be as bad if it didn’t go hand in hand with the confinement of her mind.

She is supposed to give into her husband unquestionably, but even as she knows she is not supposed to speak up she does it throughout and usually ends in her breakdowns. It’s incredible but, as she is getting crazier she is feeling better in mind and her husband agrees that she is getting better in body. Towards the end of the story the narrator “escapes”, and she lets us know that there is no going back "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" The paper here seems to be an allegory of the life she left behind, destroying it by going crazy.  And she doesn’t just escape, the coup the grâce is a last act of defiance, she lets him know he is in her way with the last line of  “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" The very end is my favorite part!

Quotation/Paraphrase with Help from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

1-
“upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”


2-
I am surprised how well Edgar Allan Poe is able to connect the feeling of sobering up/hangover to the feeling of sadness and dread he feels as he looks at the house in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”


3-
In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allan Poe uses elaborate language to describe for us the feeling of dread he experiences when he looks at the house. The feeling seems to be more than he can stand with the line “for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.” It makes me wonder what other images he has seen and why he can’t cope with this one.


4-
Edgar Allan Poe’s passage of “The Fall of the House of Usher” opens with him riding on a horse as he spots the house of Usher and night is beginning to fall.


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In the “The Fall of the House of Usher" the narrator tells us he is riding on a horse during an autumn afternoon. He is on his way to the house of Usher. When he finally sees it, a feeling of dread comes over him. The feeling is so strong he has trouble describing it. He also cannot understand why the feeling is there.


6-
The passage of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is about the narrator feeling a strange sensation when he arrives at his destination. He cannot understand why the feeling is present.