Charlotte Gilman & TS Eliot Essay PDF

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Analytical Essay #1 The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about the life of a youthful couple named Jane and John, following the birth of their child. John was a physician who believed his wife should start rest cure, now known as bed rest. He took her to spend a summer in a mansion, where she was confined to an upstairs bedroom that had windows that were barred off and decayed wallpaper. After being forced to cease taking part in anything that was considered creative, Jane started a secret journal and slowly began to obsess about the yellowing wallpaper. As time passed by, she became increasingly possessive of her writings as her insanity deteriorated, until she was entirely convinced that there were women trapped in the wallpaper of her room. Charlotte Perkins Gilman liked to use a lot of the same motifs throughout her writings. One theme that could have been considered prominent in Gilman’s works was the inferior position that women held in their marriages and the effect that seemed to have on the attitudes and actions of the married women. A different issue that Gilman wrote about was her perception of the treatment known as the rest cure – using the deprivation of creativeness as a treatment for depression. Gilman was personally recommended the use treatment by a renowned specialist but quickly concluded that it had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Charlotte Perkins Gilman used this message in the Yellow Wallpaper to try to convince physicians everywhere that self-expression and creativity not only help healing process move much quicker, but that it can help bring back lost feelings of selfcontrol. The Hollow Men is a poem by T.S. Eliot about men who have meaningless existences’ and live in a Hell-like world, because they weren’t foul or violent enough in life to have properly earned passing over the River Styx into Hell. They also weren’t considered good enough to make it into Heaven either, so they live in a place filled with shattered images. The souls who have

been left behind are known as the Hollow Men, and they are afraid to look upon or be looked upon by those who have crossed over to death’s dream kingdom. In the last section of Eliot’s poem, the narrator tells the readers about a shadow that falls over the Hollow Men, paralyzing them and preventing them from doing everything, including living or existing. Then in the final lines of the poem, the Hollow Men’s world comes to an end, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” One of the main themes that stands out in Eliot’s the Hollow Men is the anguish of being exiled. The Hollow Men are not only banished from moving on to Heaven or Hell, but they are also eternally exiled from ever knowing if they could be perceived as a good or bad person in the eyes of their God. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and T.S. Eliot are both adept authors, who direct their talents towards very different genres. However, despite the difference in their writing approaches, there are a few themes that belong to both the eerie short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, as well as the haunting poem, the Hollow Men. An example of one of these motifs could be the dissatisfaction that the characters can face in these divergent works. Jane, the protagonist of the Yellow Wallpaper, is not appeased with her life because it does not include any sort of creativity. She had to resort to hiding a secret journal and studying the worn-out wallpaper in her bedroom, which winds up being her undoing, incidentally. The Hollow Men are conceivably disgruntled and insatiable due to being trapped in the state of strange non-existence, as well as with their continual fate of being eternally left behind. Another topic of similar interest between the writers could be the damaged or delicate mental capacity of the characters they write about. In the Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman demonstrates Jane’s psychological status as sometimes indicates a simply, fragile state and at other times displaying down-right deranged behavior. This is most likely cause by the deprivation of the creative outlets she needed to help channel her troubles.

Eliot’s the Hollow Men exhibits the impaired psyche through the difficulty people have communicating with each other, which illustrates the damage that humanity may have sustained as a whole. Though the subjects, characters, and writing styles of these two works are very different, there are a few underlying similarities in the messages that Charlotte Perkins Gilman and T.S. Eliot wanted their readers to comprehend....