Friday 8 February 2013

Goth Girl Wallpaper

Source(google.com.pk)
Goth Girl Wallpaper Biography
The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period.[2] The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."[3]
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."[4]
The story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband, John, believes that it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure after the birth of their child. She may be suffering from what would now be called postpartum psychosis.

The family goes to spend the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it." She is confined to an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery, as the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. However, she comes to suspect that another woman was once confined here against her will. The reader is left unsure as to whether the damage she describes in the room is in fact being done by the narrator herself rather than by previous occupants – at one point she bites the wooden bedhead – and the bars may have been placed on the windows by her own husband as a precaution.
The narrator devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper in the room—its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the various missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight. With no stimuli other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing that she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the narrator begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.

On the last day of summer, the narrator locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I've got out at last," and her husband faints as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each time she passes.
Interpretation
Feminist interpretation

This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of the 19th-century medical profession.[5] The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, that she should engage with society instead of remaining isolated, that she should attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as irrational and, therefore, unqualified to offer ideas about her own condition. The feminist interpretation has drawn on the concept of the "domestic sphere" that women were held in during this period.[6]
Modern feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the story: while some may claim that the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a woman's assertion of freedom in a marriage in which she felt trapped.[7] The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found that for which she was looking – an escape. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband John lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her sanity.
Susan S. Lanser in her article Feminist Criticism ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and the Politics of Color in America praises comtemporary feminism and its role in changing the study and the interpretation of literature.[8] During the rise of feminism in the sixties and seventies, academic women studied the books of the men and few women part of the standard curriculum. In conclusion, these women came to find literature is greatly political and compassed by patriarchial idealogy. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was part of many books that were lost in time because of the idealogy which determined the works' content to be disturbing or offensive.[8] Feminist criticism sought to denounce this idealogy and the re-discovery of the “lost” novels such as “ The Yellow Wallpaper” which was denounced, proved that literature and history was political. Critics such as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly “italic text” rejected the novel because “[he] could not forgive [himself] if [he] made others as miserable as [he] made [himself].” Lanser argues that the same argument of devastation and misery can be said about the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but his work is still printed and studied by academics.

Goth Girl Wallpaper
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Goth Girl Wallpaper

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