The Yellow Wallpaper and The Blue Lenses. Essay Example

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a woman who goes mad after being forced into resting by her husband. The rest has the contrary results since instead of bringing her into a relaxed state; she develops a mental sickness that results in hysteria, restlessness, and nervousness. According to her husband, she also develops hallucinations since she starts seeing the yellow wallpaper in her room, transforming into a woman who came to torment her. The unnamed woman's husband, John, creates the woman's `damsel in distress situation when he forces her into rest and, in the process, is directly responsible for her plight. The infantilization in the story also represents the current situation in which women are assumed to be weak. Therefore decisions about them and their lives should be left to men.

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The infantilization creates an eerie feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, which puts the narrator and the other women in the society at risk. John is also the protagonist in the narration, since he helps in aggravating the situation by ignoring her calls, thus worsening his wife's mental illness. As the woman remains locked in her room to `rest,' she experiences the wallpaper, in which she feels that her true self is trapped, and every once in a while, the wallpaper comes to life and beats her up (Gilman, 3). Therefore, it can be translated that the woman discovers that society traps her, and there is nothing she could do about it. The wallpaper consumes the woman's mental health, and her obsession with the wallpaper eventually brings her to complete madness. The last evidence of the narrator being trapped is when she notices that she cannot escape her plight physically, and therefore opts to escape into the wallpaper through her mental imaginations. It is scary when she starts referring to herself by the third person, meaning that she had completely lost herself.

The Blue Lenses starts with a tragic event when Marda West was forced into rest after a procedure was carried out on her eyes to correct her failing vision. Therefore, a `damsel in distress situation was created, whereby she was constrained by the sickness and the societal norms of her time, which needed her to be excessively submissive to her husband. Emotional suspense occurs when the nurse who was supposed to be taking care of Marda ends up becoming Jim's lover, and this puts Marda in danger since every night, the nurse who Marda had grown to like and trust administers morphine secretly into Marda's system so that she and Jim could have sexual relations while she slept. The situation is worsened when Marda's bandages are removed, and she is given blue lenses, which would help her see until her eyes got better (Du Maurier, 59).

The situation is an uncomfortable one since she only sees in hues of blue, and it gets worse when she starts seeing the people around her as the animals that they indeed are. The nurse appears as a cow, and the doctor a fox terrier. She sees people appearing as different animals on the street when she looks out when she tries to confirm her findings. Jim appears as a blood-thirsty hawk, and this symbolism comes to life when he makes Marda sign papers that she cannot see, probably to defraud her. Nurse Ansel appears as a slithering snake, and when she makes Marda take her pills, which she had by now discovered to be the reason for her sleepiness, Marda escapes but collapses and regains consciousness when she is back to the hospital. Thankfully, her eyesight is restored, and therefore she does not need shape-distorting lenses. While everyone’s appearance is back to human form when she looks at them, she is surprised when she sees herself in the mirror appearing as an innocent and scared doe, ready to be sacrificed, signifying her helplessness.

Works Cited

Du Maurier, Daphne. The Blue Lenses, and Other Stories. Penguin, 1970.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The yellow wallpaper and other writings. Gibbs Smith, 2019.