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The role of women in literature
The role of women in literature
How society plays a role in identity issues
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During the late eighteen hundreds, according to society, women were not allowed to have their own identities. Their thoughts and opinions were irrelevant. Women were far from being an equal to their spouse. Married women with children had a role to play and were not expected to deviate from that role, unless they were mentally incapable. Society instilled what was to be expected, therefore women should know their position in a marriage.
Both women from The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper were frustrated with the path their lives had taken. Their husbands treated them like a child. Maybe this is due to the fact that they were not performing as an adult. In The Yellow Wallpaper, John loves his wife and wants the best for her. Even though
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Her identity of a wife and mother is stifled through the work of her husband and sister in law. Both John and his sister Jennie, do not want her to think about her condition, however that is the only thing she is able to think about. She had given birth to her baby a short time before moving into the house with the yellow wallpaper. Perhaps she suffered from postpartum depression, however not much was known about this during these times. If she had gotten proper treatment for her depression, maybe she would have overcome her illness. Instead, she was essentially locked away in a room and told to rest. She strives to form her own identity that has been lost due to her illness. Ultimately the narrator loses her whole identity to the wallpaper. She transforms from the depression filled wife and mother to one of the women creeping behind the wallpaper. The narrator destroys the wallpaper in an effort to escape the hold her husband has over her. In the end she loses her identity along with her …show more content…
The social norm tells her that she should be a dutiful wife and mother. This is not what she wants. She yearns for happiness, not really knowing what happiness is or where to get is from. Her identity is lost. She was her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife and her children’s mother. There was no room for the true Edna Pontellier to shine through. She may have been content with this situation until Robert Lebrun won her heart. He made Edna want to be her own person. She realized she had passions outside the walls of her family, however she felt as if these passions had came too late. She was torn between the life she was used to and the life she longed to live. This confusion ultimately leads to her
The narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression. " In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
It is clear that in their marriage, her husband makes her decisions on her behalf and she is expected to simply follow blindly. Their relationship parallels the roles that men and women play in marriage when the story was written. The narrator’s feelings of powerlessness and submissive attitudes toward her husband are revealing of the negative effects of gender roles. John’s decision to treat the narrator with rest cure leads to the narrator experiencing an intense feeling of isolation, and this isolation caused her mental decline. Her descent into madness is at its peak when she grows tears the wallpaper and is convinced that “[she’s] got out at last, in spite of [John] and Jennie… and [they] can’t put her back!”
John is a physician, and he feels like he knows the best treatment for her depression. Even though he feels like there is nothing really wrong with her and constantly reminds her of this. The treatment ultimately is to be locked away in the old nursery with yellow wallpaper and bars on the windows. Loralee MacPike writes a piece titled “Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” to illustrate the impact of setting and environment. MacPike makes the point that “The woman is legally a child; socially, economically, and philosophically she must be led by an adult—her husband; and therefore the nursery is an appropriate place to house her.” This is a very valid point showing that women are considered lesser and unequal to their male counterparts. MacPike is trying to trying to explain the male role in keeping the women oppressed and isolated. Because the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression, the old nursery is the perfect prison for her. The yellow wallpaper is just one more thing to push her over the edge. She was already suffering from postpartum depression and the isolation merely makes it worse. Postpartum depression already makes many feel very inadequate, so the isolation in a nursery just makes the narrator spiral more and more into
In The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator and her husband John have gone to a secluded estate, which they are renting for the summer. John a Doctor wanted her to rest as much as possible by following Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's “Rest Cure”. He also picked the room, which is an airy room on the top floor; she would have preferred the small pretty room on the ground floor, but he did not take her opinion due to he was the physician and knew best. The narrator does as she is told even if she is not found of the estate and the room she would be staying at. She has to rest all day long and personally disagree with what she has to do; she would rather spend her time writing, but her husband and other family members think it is not a good idea. She also described the house in her journal, as mostly positive, but some disturbing elements such as the wallpaper; she also becomes better at hiding her journal from John to continue writing. She complains about Johns controlling ways and how he discourages her from fantasizing of people walking the walkways. She has a wonderful time during the fourth of July with her family, then here obsession grows with the sub-pattern of the wallpaper; John started to think her conditions is improving, but she is sleeping less and less. The sub-pattern sees a woman creeping around and shaking the bars and sh...
She does not accept their diagnosis but has no other choice but to follow it’s harsh procedures, much like the woman of the 19th century. The wallpaper, rules, and opinions of others stood between the narrator’s imagination and intellectual desires, eventually driving her to insanity. However, she is not the only woman in the story to feel this snared feeling. John’s sister, Jennie, claimed that she wouldn't mind tearing the wallpaper apart herself, proving she also felt oppressed by the strict rules of society. The narrator finds Jennie studying the wallpaper, trying to solve the puzzle behind the bizarre rules and restrictions upon women at the time.
They are written during a time period when women were not viewed as important as men. The narrator from the yellow wallpaper is suffering from post-natal depression and has been recommended the rest of her cure by her husband and her brother, both physicians. Instead of curing her, it worsened her condition. The protagonist did try to convince her husband about what she would prefer, but she could not overcome the powerful authority figure. The narrator is restricted from working, writing, which leads to her obsession with the yellow wallpaper and suffocates her into madness.
Although both protagonists in the stories go through a psychological disorder that turns their lives upside down, they find ways to feel content once again. In Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, damp room covered in musty wallpaper all play important roles in driving the wife insane. Gilman's masterful use of not only the setting, both time and place, but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to process the woman's growing insanity. The narrator develops a very intimate relationship with the yellow wallpaper throughout the story, as it is her constant companion. Her initial reaction to it is a feeling of hatred; she dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but does not attribute anything peculiar to it. Two weeks into their stay she begins to project a sort of personality onto the paper, so she studies the pattern more closely, noticing for the first time “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman). At this point, her madness is vague, but becoming more defined, because although the figure that she sees behind the pattern has no solid shape, she dwells on it and
She becomes too weak to write and devotes all of her time to studying the wallpaper. She begins to see shapes in the wallpaper -- to start off with, it looks to her as it is filled with “absurd, unblinking eyes.” The more she examines the wallpaper, the more she sees. She sees a pattern within the initial pattern -- something she describes as “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure.” She feels as though her condition has not improved and her husband states that he will send her to Weir Mitchell, a well renowned physician, but Jane does not want this. Her mental state starts to decline and she becomes more emotional, crying at almost anything and her obsession with the wallpaper grows, with her becoming determined to find the purpose of the wallpaper’s pattern. The “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” she initially sees begins to take the shape of a woman, whom she believes is trapped inside the wallpaper. At night when she’s watching this “woman”, she sees her struggling to free herself from the
An important theme throughout this story is the importance of self-expression. John’s wife is forced to hide her anxieties and fears in order to portray that her illness is improving. “But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (239). Taking in the fact that her husband is a physician, the physician’s wife should not have mental problems or cry. Finally, Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol. John’s wife describes it: “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly Sulphur tint in others” (240). Gilman uses the wallpaper to symbolize the great amount of women out there who feel trapped by medicine and family. At the end of the story, Gilman describes how John’s wife started to rip the paper off the wall. She locked herself in the room and threw the key so nobody could get in there. Once John retrieved the key, he unlocked the door to find his wife tearing apart the
Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband, John. As one of the few characters in the story, John plays a pivotal role in the regression of the narrator’s mind. Again, the narrator uses the wallpaper to convey her emotions. Just as the shapes in the wallpaper become clearer to the narrator, in her mind, she is having the epiphany that John is in control of her.
Depression is an illness oftentimes misunderstood by the individual and their family. One symptom of depression is isolation and in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen,” the protagonists feel trapped and unfulfilled in their ordinary lives causing them to become depressed. The battle both these characters undergo reveal many compelling similarities, despite the origin and breaking points of their disturbing thoughts and actions. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “To Room Nineteen,” the two protagonists experience isolation from the world and people around them.
The wallpaper increasingly becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning, finding a woman trying to break free. Over time, she identifies completely with this woman - with the bars in her own room - and believes she is also trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper she believes that she has broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. The wallpaper 's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced sickness and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight (see Sunlight as oppressive, moonlight as liberating, below). By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is the first stage in a feminist uprising; though the early feminists had to hide in the shadows, they paved the way for later generations to walk with heads held
While she is in this room, her health gets worse and worse but her husband thinks she is getting better and that she is just imagining things. In John S. Bak’s article, he explains the room as a drain to the women’s life because she has locked is this room and has no options on leaving. Bak explains how the room with the wallpaper can, “reduce an artistic and articulate woman to be a beast, tipped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all fours in circuits, or smooches about the room” (Bak 39-40). In his article, he explains how Elain Hedges on interpretation on feminist and how she portrays the wallpaper that is living inside the narrator as spirit. Hedges on view during 1973 that the “paper symbolizes her situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself (Afterword 51), a view echoed by later critics” (Bak 40). Hedges also said, “‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ then, became a feminist text that indicated the men who were responsible for the narrator’s physical confinement and subsequent mental demise” (Bak 40). Another writer in Baks article has his view of the symbolism of the wallpaper, “but this is also a room not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century Panopticon” (Bak 40). In Baks article as you see, there are
"The Yellow Wallpaper" motivated the female mind of creativity and mental strength through a patriarchal order of created gender roles and male power during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. While John represented characteristics of a typical male of his time, the yellow wallpaper represented a controlling patriarchal society; a sin of inequality that a righteous traitor needed to challenge and win. As the wallpaper deteriorates, so does the suppressing effect that male hierarchy imposed on women. Male belief in their own hierarchy was not deteriorating. Females began to think out of line, be aware of their suppression, and fight patriarchal rule. The progression of the yellow wallpaper and the narrator, through out the story, leads to a small win over John. This clearly represents and motivates the first steps of a feminist movement into the twentieth century.
Ever since she has been entrapped in her room, the narrator’s vivid imagination has crafted fictional explanations for the presence of inconsistencies in the wallpaper. She explains them by saying “The front pattern does move! And no wonder! The woman behind shakes it” (Gilman 9). In the story, the narrator explains the woman mentioned creeps in and about the old house she and her husband reside in. Venturing towards the conclusion, the narrator becomes hysterical when thinking about the wallpaper, explaining to her husband’s sister Jennie how she would very much like to tear the wallpaper down. Jennie offers to do it herself, but the narrator is persistent in her desire-”But I am here, and nobody touches that paper but me-not ALIVE”(Gilman 10)! The narrator has realized the apex of her mental instability as the story