Charlotte Perkins Gilman And The Rest Cure.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Rest Cure.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" and Its Autobiographical Background.

Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Biographical Background 4 2.1 General Information 4 2.2 Gilman and the Rest Cure 5 3. The Rest Cure 5 4. Parallels between Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Experiences and Her Short Story "The Yellow Wallpaper" 6 4.1 Comparison of Fictional Characters with Authentic Persons 6 4.1.1 The Narrator Compared with Charlotte Perkins Gilman 6 4.2.2 John Compared with S. Weir Mitchell 7 4.2 Images and Stylistic Means Used to Emphasize the Author's Intention 8 4.2.1 The Function of Madness 9 4.2.2 The Wallpaper 9 4.3.3 The Final Scene 11 5. Conclusion 12 6. Bibliography 14 1. Introduction Literature, an art of expressing feelings and emotions with the help of words, has been and is primarily used by writers as an instrument to convey a certain message to the reader.

In many stories one can discover analogies to the autobiographical background of the author, who intended to express, more or less covert, an essential incident and its effect on the mind. A valid example is the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890. The female main character becomes mad by undergoing a special rest cure, supervised by her husband, which should cure her from a nervous depression. Even this brief summary makes perceptible that there are certain parallels to the life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who also suffered from the Rest Cure of a famous neurologist. The more thoroughly one studies the central character, the male antagonist and the environmental circumstances in "The Yellow Wallpaper" the more similarities can be found to the biography of the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She describes here a crucial experience made by herself and what it...