No one enjoys waiting, especially at the dentist’s office where the only thing more interesting than the outdated magazines on the side table is the repetitive pattern lining the walls. It seems that in many doctor’s offices there is that ominous paper glued to the walls that transfixes people. It swims and turns like an optical illusion and can make even the sanest people a little stir-crazy. Similar to the purgatory that people face in these offices, in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is forced to stare at the same walls covered in a hideous yellow paper. Many people believe that this story’s major theme is the subordination of woman, especially after marriage; however, this assumption can become confused and jumbled …show more content…
The two main approaches to this type of criticism are very different, but help make distinctions in the text. Essentialists focus on the biologically determined sex of a character in literature, while others focus on constructivism or the qualities determined by society as strictly male or female. Constructivists argue that patriarchal gender roles harm women’s confidence and assertiveness, promoting stereotypes and false binaries. Gender constructivism favors the idea that gender and sexual categories are a societal construct that prefers men and restricts women. The application of this literary criticism to a text looks into the character and their relevance to the plot. Focusing on how the character promotes or rejects the imposed gender roles is a significant part in the use of this lens (Hildreth January …show more content…
The story follows the journal entries of a woman in the late 1800s for three summer months. Her husband placed her in a former nursery under strict orders not to leave after the birth of her first child. This is what was known as the ‘rest cure’, a medical treatment given to hysterical women in this particular time, especially after they had given birth. Her husband forbids her from seeing most friends unless she is supervised and restricts her from writing in her journals for the sake of her health. This narrator writes that she disagrees with her husband and his diagnosis, but she passes it off as something “one expects… in marriage” (Gilman 647) and says nothing. Her husband grows desperate to cure her, and in his anxiety, he threatens to “send [her] to Weir Mitchell in the fall” (Gilman 650), a mental health facility of ill repute. As the story progresses, her care is placed into the hands of the housemaid and sister-in-law, Jennie. Her relationship becomes more and more strained with her husband as she sees less of him
Misogynistic Confinement Yellow Wallpaper depicts the nervous breakdown of a young woman and is an example as well as a protest of the patriarchal gender based treatments of mental illness women of the nineteenth century were subjected to. The narrator begins the story by recounting how she speculates there may be something wrong with the mansion they will be living in for three months. According to her, the price of rent was way too cheap and she even goes on to describe it as “queer”. However, she is quickly laughed at and dismissed by her husband, who as she puts it “is practical in the extreme.” As the story continues, the reader learns that the narrator is thought to be sick by her husband John, yet she is not as convinced as him.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about an anonymous female narrator and her husband John who is a physician who has rented a colonial manner in the summer. Living in that house, the narrator felt odd living there. Her husband, john who is a physician and also a doctor to his wife felt that the narrator is under nervous depression. He further mentions that when a person is under depression, every feeling is an odd feeling. Therefore, the narrator was not given permission by John to work but just to take medication and get well fast. This made the narrator to become so fixated with the yellow wallpaper in the former nursery in which she located. She was depressed for a long time and became even more depressed. This ha...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through such treatments. Because of her experience with the rest cure, it can even be said that Gilman based the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" loosely on herself. But I believe that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman/women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. To put it briefly, it’s about a married woman who moves to a mansion to recuperate after her physician had diagnosed her with “neurasthenia” or what they referred in the story as a “slight hysterical tendency.” What makes this story special is the treatment she received, how she was treated and most importantly what happened in the “yellow room.” Unlike most other stories that were written before and during her time, this story conveys a very strong point. It emphasizes the idea of “self-expression”, specifically for women and opposition to the “rest cure”. Having encountered similar experiences like the unnamed character in the story, her remonstration of the “rest cure” was entailed as a result of her repressed activities required by the treatment.
The setting of these two stories emphasize, on visually showing us how the main characters are based around trying to find freedom despite the physical, mental and emotional effects of living in confinement. While on the other hand, dealing with Psychology’s ugly present day behavior showing dystopia of societies views of women during the time period they lived.
Throughout most of literature and history, the notion of ‘the woman’ has been little more than a caricature of the actual female identity. Most works of literature rely on only a handful of tropes for their female characters and often use women to prop up the male characters: female characters are sacrificed for plot development. It may be that the author actually sacrifices a female character by killing her off, like Mary Shelly did in Frankenstein in order to get Victor Frankenstein to confront the monster he had created, or by reducing a character to just a childish girl who only fulfills a trope, as Oscar Wilde did with Cecily and Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. Using female characters in order to further the male characters’
conceptualizations of gender in literature are situated in a culture and historical context ; the
“The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a woman who is trapped in a room covered in yellow wallpaper. The story is one that is perplexing in that the narrator is arguably both the protagonist as well as the antagonist. In the story, the woman, who is the main character, struggles with herself indirectly which results in her descent into madness. The main conflicts transpires between the narrator and her husband John who uses his power as a highly recognize male physician to control his wife by placing limitations on her, forcing her to behave as a sick woman. Hence he forced himself as the superior in their marriage and relationship being the sole decision make. Therefore it can be said what occurred externally resulted in the central conflict of” “The Yellow Wallpaper being internal. The narrator uses the wallpaper as a symbol of authenticy. Hence she internalizes her frustrations rather then openly discussing them.
Throughout history women have been inferior to men. A woman in a patriarchal society had no opinion of value and was dependent upon man from birth to death both financially and emotionally. Both Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" show the repression of women, women as a lesser entity, and further the defiance of societal norms as feministic characters.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story told from the first person point of view of a doctor's wife who has nervous condition. The first person standpoint gives the reader access only to the woman’s thoughts, and thus, is limited. The limited viewpoint of this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the wife feels throughout the story. The point of view is also limited in that the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no benefit of hindsight, and is never able to actually see that the men in her life are part of the reason she never gets well. This paper will discuss how Gilman’s choice of point of view helps communicate the central theme of the story- that women of the time were viewed as being subordinate to men. Also, the paper will discuss how ignoring oneself and one’s desires is self-destructive, as seen throughout the story as the woman’s condition worsens while she is in isolation, in the room with the yellow wallpaper, and her at the same time as her thoughts are being oppressed by her husband and brother.
The Yellow Paper is a short story published in 1892, and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte tells of a disheartening tale of a woman who struggles to free herself from postpartum depression. The Yellow Paper gives an account of an emotionally and intellectual deteriorated woman struggles to break free from a mental prison her husband had put her into, in order to find peace. The woman lived in a male dominated society and wanted indictment from it as she had been driven crazy, because of the Victorian “rest-cure” (Gilman 45). Her husband decided to force her to have a strict bed rest by separating her from her only child. He took her to recuperate in an isolated country estate all alone. The bed rest her husband forced into made her mental state develop from bad to worst. The Yellow Paper is a story that warns the readers about the consequences of fixed gender roles in a male-dominated world. In The Yellow Paper, a woman’s role was to be a dutiful wife and she should not question her husband’s authority and even whereabouts. Whereas, a man’s role was to be a husband, main decision maker, rational thinker and his authority was not to be questioned by the wife.
Gender roles seem to be as old as time and have undergone constant, but sometime subtle, revisions throughout generations. Gender roles can be defined as the expectations for the behaviors, duties and attitudes of male and female members of a society, by that society. The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is a great example of this. There are clear divisions between genders. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century where a rigid distinction between the domestic role of women and the active working role of men exists (“Sparknotes”). The protagonist and female antagonists of the story exemplify the women of their time; trapped in a submissive, controlled, and isolated domestic sphere, where they are treated as fragile and unstable children while the men dominate the public working sphere.
Conclusion: Evaluate how the texts challenge or subvert patriarchal conventions of the literary representation of gendered
Throughout literature, authors employ a variety of strategies to highlight the central message being conveyed to the audience. Analyzing pieces of literature through the gender critics lens accentuates what the author believes to be masculine or feminine and that society and culture determines the gender responsibility of an individual. In the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, the gender strategies appear through the typical fragile women of the mother and the grandmother, the heartless and clever male wolf, and the naïve and vulnerable girl as little red riding hood.