The Yellow Wallpaper Reponse

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a woman who had a whole lot of emotions conflicting each other and going crazy within her life. Since authors are known for writing about what they are the most knowledgeable on or what they truly believe in life, Charlotte Perkins Gilman implemented a large portion and variety of pathos within her story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Since she used pathos in her piece of writing, she was using a literary technique to try an appeal to the audience’s emotional side.

When she placed pathos within her story, she did so to show her audience how much stress was being inflicted on her, on a daily basis. When Gilman is explaining to the audience that her husband is a trained physician and tells her that she simply has temporary nervous depression, she states that his unwillingness to be even partially religious “is one reason I don’t get well faster.” (Gilman, 1) The fact that her husband is not willing to listen to her and believe her, when she says that she thinks she may have a serious sickness, shows the audience how the husband, in actuality, is only adding to the amount of stress that is already being applied onto her. When instead of hurting her even more, he should listen to his wife and try to help her more. Her husband and brother both thought that it would be logical for her to cease from working. When she is describing this to her audience, she states the many things relating to labor that she is not allowed to do. By describing the situation in this way, she stresses to her audience how much she really does love to work. While she is telling her audience about how her husband and her brother try to vocally tell her that she should keep away from any type of labor, she instead does the complete opposite and tries to continue working without getting caught by either her husband or her brother. Yet again, when her husband and her brother make an attempt to try and stop her from pursuing what she truly happens to love in life, they are counteracting there purpose for wanting her to cease from doing any type of labor. Instead, they result in causing her more stress because she has to use a whole lot of her mental power trying to worry about getting caught working. Another reason for why she put pathos into her literary work was to ensure herself that her audience would not become confused. She made sure that her audience would not have to ever ponder what she was talking about by writing her story as if she were personally talking to her audience. “So I will let it alone and talk about the house.” (Gilman) When she states this, she is writing this story as if she were directly talking to her paper’s audience. Instead of simply going straight to talking about the house, she provides her audience with a direct statement saying that she will begin to discuss on the subject of the house she was looking at. Since she just wrote that she would start writing down what she thought of the house, she was trying to form a close relationship with her audience members by making sure that they do not become confused on what the author is talking about. She used pathos when she described the house by first clearly stating that she thought it was beautiful. After that she carefully started describing the house in complete detail. Also, instead of simply using one or two sentences to describe what she thought of the house, she decided to dedicate a whole paragraph on the topic. She also uses pathos to describe to her audience how thinking about her condition makes her feel. “I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (Gilman) Her condition makes her feel like a huge cloud of dreariness is floating above her because she is filled with so much depression a large majority of the time. Pathos gives Gilman the opportunity to not only tell her audience her story but to do so and appeal to her audience’s emotions.

Since she used pathos in her piece of writing, she was using a literary technique to try an appeal to the audience’s emotional side. Without putting pathos into Gilman’s writing, her story would have been told, but it most likely would not be considered as good as it is today.