EAC essay

EAC essay

The Yellow Wallpaper Reading Response
The yellow wallpaper is a story with a narrator, a victim of mental illness confined in a room on a summer vacation with her husband, a doctor in hopes to be cured. In this story the narrator is forced to sit in isolation most of the day with no distractions of any sort in her husbands and hers best interest. Although following the stories main motif of irony any attempts are curing her result in failure and even serve to deepen the problem. One of the repercussions, of her husband’s ironic attempts at curing her which left her deprived of all stimulation, was a dependency on the wall paper in her room. Clinging to the wall paper the narrator loses touch even more with reality. The husband, ironic treatment and the wallpaper are all examples of how the “The yellow Wallpaper” narrates the protagonist descend into madness.
The husband of the narrator, John is a highly regarded physician and this fact is mention several times throughout the text. Being in the time they live, and being a male physician John tries to treat his wife and thinks he knows what is best for her. While John is treating his wife by keeping her in a room and telling her not to read or write or do anything with her mind, he fails to listen to her feedback. He assumes his methods are working even when they are failing in front of his eyes. The narrator’s condition begins to worsen because of Johns methods and she slowly begins her decent into madness. At the beginning she says “so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” this is foreshadowing her seclusion from reality caused by the “better “judgement of her husband. This also shows that the narrator feels she can no longer express herself in front of John due to his condescending and all-knowing attitude. All these factors contribute to the story’s motif of irony and how this very irony is the cause of the narrators suffering.
The story makes use of irony in...

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