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Madhouse

Adam Joseph
February 22, 2006
Question # 1
It's A Madhouse! Or is it?
The mood sinks and your mind wanders off of the ordinary and fixes on the strange and unusual. The sticky confines of the ward exacerbate insane conditions. Plucked from reality and shoved into this mysterious hell hole, where delusion and hallucination are common and our fancy's run wild. A madhouse is a place of great disorder and confusion where individuals with erratic and insane tendencies are detained or chose to reside.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator spends all of her time in an isolated room with only a bed that is bolted down to the floor. Covering the walls in this room is a horrid yellow wallpaper, hence the title. Initially she is disgusted by the wallpaper, but the more time she concentrates on it she is very intrigued by it. Eventually she realizes that there is a woman trapped inside of the wallpapers bars, always creeping around. She views the room where she is told to rest and stay in as a prison and she relates the woman behind the wallpaper to herself. Little by little she removes the wallpaper thinking she will free the woman. Once all of the wallpaper is gone she thinks that she was the woman that was behind the wallpaper all along and she begins to creep alongside the wall.
To the narrator her space where she is detained is a prison. It is enforced by her husband John who is a doctor. John treats her like a child and says he knows what is best for her because he is a doctor. She loved to write and keep a diary but John would not let her because he was afraid that her mind may be too fanciful. The narrator was feeling so oppressed and held back by John's demands that she envisioned a woman being oppressed by the hideous wallpaper. She became so obsessed, that it was all that she thought about. This was brought on by what she has been going through her whole life because she had no independence or say in...