Thesis:

In Lisa Bright and Dark and The Yellow Wallpaper, women suffer from perceived
madness, showing isolation can be both a cause of and effect of insanity.
Supporting Paragraph:
Due to a societal stigma placed on their madness, each woman faces dismissal when they
attempt to express their condition, leading to further mental decline. As is often the case with
insular communities, the female subjects face a society eager to disregard and cover-up their
madness. In trying to appear as a wholesome unit, communities are often unwilling to accept
that one of their own is suffering from insanity due to the innate aversion to conflict needed to
uphold general decorum. For the characters of Lisa and Jane, societys rejection of their
symptoms prevents them from getting help when they need it most, ultimately resulting in
tragedy. Lisa, a sixteen year old girl slowly losing her mind, is unable to find a supportive adult,
as her pleas are dismissed as trivial overreactions. When asking for a psychiatrist someone
who would understand and know what to do, the only advice she receives is the infuriatingly
placating Youve seen too many movies (Neufeld 10). Her society acts to deny her care
because they are unwilling to accept the fact that one of their own is no longer behaving in ways
in tune with [their] way of living (Neufeld 80). This will eventually drive Lisa to greater
depths of madness in her attempts at reaching help, contrasting Janes case in The Yellow
Wallpaper. For Jane, a woman suffering post-partum depression and more than her fair share of
emotional manipulation, she has become complacent and unwilling to seek help as a result of
societys shunning. If a physician of high standing, and ones own husband, assures friends and
relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one what is one to do? (Gilman 33). Jane
is locked away in a room where her community no longer has to face her madness; left to her

own devices in the hope that rest will ease her troubled mind. She comes to believe in the
treatment even as it slowly erodes her will, saying how I feel basely ungrateful not to value it
more (Gilman 34). Ultimately, both women are driven to greater degrees of insanity as a direct
result of their society trying to sweep their conditions under the rug. These attempts, whilst
comforting to the world around them, horribly accelerate the womens decline and are only
broken by extreme acts which force their hypocritical society to see the truth, ultimately
damaging it far more than addressing their madness directly ever would have.