Antigone's Choice

Jessica M. Bird
Dr. Gilbert
English 102
16 Feb. 2010
The Truth Behind The Yellow Wallpaper
In The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are many directions the story can go.   Gilman wrote the story that way so it could be interpreted in numerous different ways.   She wanted the readers to use their own ingenuity to find out what really is happening with in the story. All the evidence throughout the story points to the narrator being in an insane asylum from the beginning
The location of the house itself is rather strange. “The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.   It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and wall and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people” (Gilman 460). The narrator describes it as an English place, yet in this time period things are modernizing.   People are staying closer to town because of the factories and jobs.   Even doctors stay closer to town to stay closer to patients because many of the factory workers get injured. The only reason the house would be far away is if it was an insane asylum.   Many times they stay farther away from town because the town feared them and outcast them as freaks. The towns were not the only things modernizing in this time period; the insane asylums were as well.
In the early nineteenth century many insane asylums used torture devices to help their patients.   They would chain them on beds nailed beds to the floor, so they could not wander at night, and also used shock therapy.   Many patients who went in only got worse and not better.   Sigmund Freud and other psychologist around the world started studying the human mind and changed the world of psychology. These psychologists believed that if you treat the patients with more humanity they would get better.   The insane asylums were completely transformed. “It is a big, airy room, the whole...