Previous knowledge of the novel Essay

From your reading of Chapters 1, 2 and 26 of Jane Eyre, as well as any front knowledge of the novel you might have, write closely the links you begin to see between that text and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The discolor paper. The Yellow wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 for a name of specific purposes, including the authors desire to raise aw beness of the condition post-partum depression, from which she suffered, and to illustrate her views on the senile nature and the inequality of Victorian society, particularly with relation to marriage.Perhaps most importantly, Gilman wanted to expose the flaws in the male treatments propositioned for post-partum depression and other similar conditions treatments from which she herself ailed even more(prenominal) than from her nervous disorder when waylaid in bed, often like the narrator of her novella albeit to a less extreme end. By contrast, Charlotte Bronti s Jane Eyre has no such(prenominal) definite intenti ons, nevertheless put to works most prominently as a bildungsroman and a partial autobiography, which leads to a genuinely different treatment of typefaces as constructs rather than as Gilmans use of them as representations.While Bronti s display cases in Jane Eyre assholenot be labelled with much more precision than Mr. Rochesters standing as a Byronic hero, the characters in The Yellow wallpaper are clearly intended for various purposes. The most obvious examples are John, the narrators husband, who embodies the Victorian male and the Victorian physician, and the narrator herself, who is intended to represent all of womankind subjected to the aforementioned(prenominal) Victorian male doctor. A commonality between the two novels exists in their inclusion of characters exhibiting madness.There can be drawn many similarities between the two differing presentations, including an obvious personal manifestation of insanity. In The Yellow Wallpaper, as the narrator falls into ma dness and particularly at the end of the novel when she has succumbed to it whole Gilman depicts her creeping by daylight about her room, crawling on the floor, round and round and round, afterward having the narrator herself earlier assert that most women do not creep by daylight, because proleptically implying something abnormal about herself.In Jane Eyre, this same physicality is apply by Bronti in her presentation of Bertha stonemason Rochester, as she is first introduced to Jane and to the readers on all fours like some strange wild animal. Bertha is utter to have snatched and growled, and laid her teeth to Mr. Rochesters neck, which is an animalistic image also shown by Gilman when she has her narrator enounce she bit off a little piece of her bed.Both authors are in this way actually deliberate in creating the metaphor of their insane characters being animals Bronti refers to Bertha through her narrator Jane as a puppet, a wild animal and a clothed hyena, and beside s these more obvious physical links, there are also allusions to hair wild as a mane, a rasping cry, an instance in which the woman bellowed, and her stature almost equalling her husband, who is built athletically, so this similarity therefore reinforces Bronti s presentation of Bertha as something of a behemoth her name even bears a optical similarity to the words beast or bear.There are several other parallels discernible between Bronti s Bertha and Gilmans narrator, for example in Jane Eyre Bertha commits the mortal sin of suicide by saltation out of an upstairs window after burning down the house in her final act of freedom, while in The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilmans narrator is far more trapped than the character of Bertha, so she can only express a desire to jump out of the window but the bars are too strong even to try, and before that Gilman had had her narrator stateI thought seriously of burning the house to reach the smell. Both identical actions are used by the two aut hors to illustrate their characters insanity and an implicit breaking down of social norms and especially a desire for suicide that goes against the core of human nature in our intrinsic survival instinct, which was a expiration seen before in the presentation of the two women as animals rather than human beings.Bertha is referred to by Bronti through Jane Eyre as an it, solidifying this idea of her insanity rendering her inhuman. However, the marked difference between the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper and one of the antagonists of Jane Eyre is indeed the fact that Bertha has the freedom to carry out her insane thoughts, while Gilman has created in her novella such an image of imprisonment that her own character fails to complete either undertaking.This idea is crucial to Gilmans message of womens entrapment in a Victorian patriarchal society, and therefore contributes to the novellas effectiveness. On the other hand, since Jane Eyre was not written with such a definite inten tion as The Yellow Wallpaper, the actions of Bertha are designed to contribute to the plot of the novel more than to convey a message about the treatment of women, the mentally insane or the handicapped, though the latter readings could also be taken.A more obvious difference between the two novels is that it is the autodiegetic narrator we can assume to be called Jane of The Yellow Wallpaper that exhibits insanity, thereby directly demonstrating to the reader the lack of cohesion in her mind, while in Jane Eyre Berthas insanity is regarded by the readers through the eyes of Bronti s eponymous narrator.Additionally, while the reader experiences the breakdown of the narrators mind from sanity to its loss in the former text, in the latter the only experience given over to the reader of Bertha is of her already mentally degraded, with no transformation shown, and little information given about her foregoing to the exhibition of her allegedly genetic insanity. Bronti emphasises the fa ct that the reader is not given the whole story of her character Bertha through the interesting manipulation of her narrator.Despite the fact that Jane Eyre is an autodiegetic narrator, the same as that of The Yellow Wallpaper, in the scene in which she is presented with Bertha, and indeed in ensuing scenes featuring Mr. Rochesters first wife, Jane Eyre becomes more of a homodiegetic narrator simply conveying the events before her but clearly on the edges of a much deeper story and a more extensive narrative than she has the ability or knowledge to recount.