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Sexism in the yellow wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
The yellow wallpaper gender oppression
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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman focuses on a woman’s struggle to escape her gender’s expectations and is pushed to insanity. The narrator's husband locks her in a room so she can rest to cure her postpartum depression. John controls her as a doctor by telling her she needs to rest and cease all work. She believes writing will help heal her, but she knows John would not allow her to do so. He controls her as a husband by keeping her confined to a small room, and this suppresses her strength and strips her of her sanity. “He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency,” (Gilman 2). John also suppresses her imagination because he believes women are not supposed to have complex thoughts. He does not listen to her; he dismisses her words as …show more content…
Women are not given jobs that require higher level thinking or any hard labor. Women's opinions do not matter, and their husbands speak for them. The narrator fits into her traditional gender role at the beginning of the story by listening what her husband tells her to do although she disagrees. She does not try to argue with him because she knows her arguments will be wasted on him; instead, she disobeys him secretly because she knows she will be in trouble if she is caught. She constantly submits because she knows she is supposed to, and her submission leads to her insanity. “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out,” (Gilman 5). The narrator has gone insane and sees herself wanting to break free from the chains that keep her bound to her gender. At the end of the story, the narrator breaks free of the prison society has put her in, and defies her gender roles and
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros, and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid are riveting short stories that focus on the roles of females in a world dominated by unmitigated male dominance. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a subservient woman who is sick and prescribed the rest cure by the will of her husband. She disregards her own physical and emotional wellness, allowing her husband full control of her actions and health until she eventually loses her sanity. Woman Hollering Creek focuses on a woman named Cleófilas who marries a man that later begins to inflict physical and mental harm upon her. However, She does not leave her relationship because she is stricken with love for him. Moreover,
It is unhealthy for any human being to have a restraint on their mind or life. Naturally, a person will become unstable living under such circumstances. People need to express their imagination and live freely in order to remain mentally stable. There are ways to restrain people who need help without controlling and taking away every aspect of their life. Where the female “madness” starts is different with every woman, but there is no doubt that there are certain factors and conditions that develop and escalate the insanity. Jane and Emily in the short stories, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, both prove to be victims of abuse from the male authority
would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper
As the story begins, the woman-whose name we never learn- tells of her depression and how it is being treated by her husband and brother who are both doctors. These two men are unable to see that there is more to her condition than just a stress and depression and prescribe for her rest as a cure. The narrator is taken to a summer house to recover form her condition where she is not allowed to do anything but rest and sleep. Furthermore, she cannot do one thing that she loves the most: writing. " I must put this away, -he hates to have me write a word." She spends most of her time in a room with yellow wallpaper and very little to occupy her mind with.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is partly autobiographical and it illustrates the fight for selfhood by a women in an oppressed and oppressive environment. In the story, the narrator is not allowed to write or think, basically becoming more dysfunctional as she is entrapped in a former nursery room where bars adorn the windows and the bed is nailed to the floor. In this story there is an obstinacy on behalf of the narrator as she tries to go around her husband's and physician's restrictions, however, there is no resisting the oppressive nature of her environment and she finally surrenders to madness even though it represents some kind of selfhood and resistance because it allows her to escape her oppression, "She obsesses about the yellow wallpaper, in which she sees frightful patterns and an imprisoned female figure trying to emerge. The narrator finally escapes from her controlling husband and the intolerable confines of her existence by a final descent into insanity as she peels the wallpaper off and bars her husband from the room" (Gilman, 1999, 1).
There are multiple possible causes for the internal conflict the narrator faces. The first being nervous depression and the other is the fact that her life is being controlled by her husband. Her husband is in full control because in the beginning of the story, John, her husband, influences how she should act. He decides the actions that should be taken in regards to her health and sanctity. Although she finds herself disagreeing with his synopsis, she is confined and does not admit how she feels to him. This also brings about another a major conflict that occurred in the 19th century, men being dominant and woman being categorized as inferior. Evidence can be found when the narrator states, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband assures friends and relatives that there is nothing the matter with o...
The Yellow Wallpaper, seems like such a simple title. Yet in reality there are so many other meanings behind it. Charlotte Gillman, the author of The Yellow Wallpaper was a real feminist. She is a writer, poet, and many other things. Gillman was born July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a born and raised American, and loved her country. She went through a lot of troubles in her life and eventually committed suicide after discovering she had cancer. Although the story portrays her as a little crazy, there are several reasons for her being this way. The Yellow Wallpaper can be very confusing, but is very true about how she felt in real life. During the story she goes through several stages of depression and as the story progresses so does the depression. This short story portrays a variety of themes, characters and symbolism.
depression that the narrator suffers from. What these analyses of The Yellow Wallpaper lack is a
"If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?" (Gilman 1). Many women in the 1800's and 1900's faced hardship when it came to standing up for themselves to their fathers, brothers and then husbands. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator of the story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", is married to a physician, who rented a colonial house for the summer to nurse her back to health after her husband thinks she has neurasthenia, but actually suffers from postpartum depression. He suggested the 'rest cure'. She should not be doing any sort of mental or major physical activity, her only job was to relax and not worry about anything. Charlotte was a writer and missed writing. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is significant to literature in the sense that, the author addresses the issues of the rest cure that Dr. S. Weir Mitchell prescribed for his patients, especially to women with neurasthenia, is ineffective and leads to severe depression. This paper includes the life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in relation to women rights and her contribution to literature as one of her best short story writings.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a confusing piece of writing; there were many hidden messages that leaves the reader wondering if the narrator/protagonist, who went unnamed throughout the story, suffers from some type of nervous depression, mental issues, or she just was living under society ways. The narrator showed signs of hallucination throughout the story; like having seen an imaginary woman in a wallpaper that she would later compare too . She was left going back and fourth contemplating whether to stay in the nursery that she placed in to help better her condition. While in the nursery, she discovered a wallpaper that she describes as "a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken
Everyone thinks differently yet they can be made so see thinks the same. Created by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper was written in the early 19 and late 18 hundreds to express her thoughts about the way the world treated depression. The universal understanding of the wall paper is always the same, yet the unique view point of the individual causes the two main conflicts towards the narrator to be seen differently towards the resolution.
When analyzing a literary work, I often consider the setting of the story to be a vivid picture painted for the reader to understand the story better. However, I have learned recently that the setting not only portrays the environment and surroundings, but it also plays a key role in the development of the plot as well as the characters. Therefore, the setting of a certain story has much more power than most people think. It creates a certain environment, helps characters change, helps them come to realizations, it can even control the way they behave. As I was analyzing the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I couldn 't help but notice that the setting had a direct influence on not only the main character of the
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story that continues to transcend time with its’ themes of feminism and mental health issues. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper must struggle not only against her own mind, but the oppressive nature of her husband and her horribly inaccurate treatment plan, the combination of which destroys her sense of self. Throughout the story the narrator shares her experiences of her mental illness in a day to day basis until she completely loses her sanity. This just shows how serious it can be to ignore a type of mental illness for too long.
Back to 1800s, in U.S and all over the world, women did not have equal rights and freedom as men. Their main roles are wives and moms, doing household and take care of family. In that scene, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” based on her own experience in 1892. Gilman suffered from postpartum depression after have her first daughter, and she was treated by her husband with “rest cure” method, but it did not work at all. Instead, this method made her illness became worse, and the result is she got obsesses to the wallpaper. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman shows to readers how bad the situations of women in 19th century. Through this story, author wants to talks about the subordination of women in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 about her experience in a psychiatric hospital. The doctor she had prescribed her “the rest cure” to get over her condition (Beekman). Gilman included the name of the sanitarium she stayed at in the piece as well which was named after the doctor that “treated” her. The short story was a more exaggerated version of her month long stay at Weir Mitchell and is about a woman whose name is never revealed and she slowly goes insane under the watch of her doctor husband and his sister (The Yellow Wallpaper 745). Many elements of fiction were utilized by Gilman in this piece to emphasize the theme freedom and confinement. Three of the most important elements are symbolism, setting and character.