The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

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Week in View

Monday: The Yellow Wallpaper

Tuesday: Flex Day

Wednesday: Adding Suspense

Thursday: A Changing Narrator

Friday: Analyzing Descriptive Language: Quiz Review

☀️ Summer Countdown: 29 days of school left - including 4 flex days.

Objectives

• I can read and annotate a fictional text independently
• I can identify key elements of the exposition of a text
• I can analyze narrative elements like setting, plot, and character

Warm Up

⭐ Grammar Connection: Modifiers

A modifier changes or adds detail to another word.

Modifier Phrases

Adjective Modifiers

Adverb Modifiers

Modifier Clauses

Key Takeaway: Adjective modifiers modify a NOUN.Adverb modifiers modify a VERB.

Meet the Author:Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. She attended several different schools, and she had an unloving mother and an absent father. These factors made her a poor student, but she was highly intelligent and creative.
• Gilman spent much of her childhood with her great aunts. Each aunt had a major impact on her.
• Gilman became a writer and a social activist. She was part of the women's suffrage movement and conveyed many of her feminist ideals in her literary works.

Many of the events you viewed about Gilman's life inspired her famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The most influential events, however, were her experiences with childbirth, postpartum depression, and a treatment from the late 1800s called “rest cure.”

Hysteria

The Rest Cure

Historical Context

Gilman was outraged about these orders. The “rest cure” caused her depression and other symptoms to worsen. She had a real disorder that needed therapy and medical attention. She observed that because it was a woman's illness, it was not recognized as something real in society. Gilman's background in writing and feminism collided with this experience. The result was the semi-autobiographical story that you will read in today's lesson.

This historical context is VERY important to understanding the text.

Vocabulary Preview

Felicity

Ancestral

Congenial

Hereditary

Untenanted

The Yellow Wallpaper

Audio Version

Do you think John really has his wife's best interests at heart, or is he just controlling? Answer in the Zoom chat.

The Rest Cure

A treatment often given to women who were suffering from postpartum depression, a condition that leaves a new mother feeling severely depressed after childbirth. Postpartum depression possibly results in the inability to care for the child, extreme sadness and mood swings, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and feeling overwhelmed. These women were instructed to rest in bed without socialization or intellectual stimulation for several hours a day to cure their alleged hysteria—hence, the term “rest cure.”

Gilman uses dashes in multiple ways in her writing. First, she uses them to highlight an instance of foreshadowing, which also gives the reader a better look into the mind of the narrator. That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care—here is something strange about this house—I can feel it. Secondly, Gilman uses dashes to add additional information. There comes John, and I must put this away—he hates to have me write a word.

In the first section of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator and her husband, John, rent a secluded mansion for the summer so she can recover from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression.” Although John insists on rest and forbids her from writing or working, the narrator secretly disagrees with his treatment and begins recording her private thoughts in her journal.

There is a clear juxtaposition between the house’s outward charm and the narrator’s growing unease. Some parts of the house are described as beautiful, grand, and stately, evoking admiration and comfort. At the same time, other aspects—like the isolated room with barred windows and disturbing wallpaper—create a sense of oppression and discomfort.

Gender norms of 1892 are shown through the unequal relationship between the narrator and her husband, John. He is a physician and authority figure whose opinions and decisions are seen as more valid than hers, while she is expected to be obedient, quiet, and dependent. The narrator’s feelings and ideas are dismissed as silly or emotional, reflecting the period’s belief that women were fragile and needed male guidance. Even something as simple as the narrator wanting to move rooms is met with denial because John does not want to.

The setting is a major part of the story. There are beautiful parts of the house and a “delicious” garden, yet John insists that the narrator stay in the upstairs room, where the wallpaper is torn and there are bars on the window. In fact, the narrator calls the color of the room “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

Hysteria

A catch-all term that was used for women's suffering because doctors at the time did not understand or take seriously what women were experiencing.