Identity And Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Many times in stories, authors use literary elements to help capture a story’s overall meaning or help the reader better understand the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of those authors which uses identity and gender roles to develop the idea that women in society are considered to be a traditional stay at home wife. She also uses a lot of figurative language to demonstrate how women were in a sense trapped and had to stay at home while men go out and work. If women were allowed to do what they wanted then the character’s insanity in “The Yellow Wallpaper” wouldn’t have been questioned and in “Mrs. Elder’s Idea” the character wouldn’t have felt so discontented with her lifestyle as a wife living with her husband.
In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist’s creative imagination is a struggle that is visible between her and John’s rational thought. The narrator feels that because she is comfortable writing down her thoughts, that she should be able to express her ideas through writing. Although John does not recognize his wife’s eagerness to be creative and so he believes that he can compel out her creative fancies and supplant them with his own particular rationality. In the text it says“ but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. 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. So I try.” (Gilman 4) This shows that he is trying to restrain her of her creativeness. However the narrator states “if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (Gilman 4). She feels as if she is in a wa...

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...s up agreeing to it. In fact “Mr. Elder found that two half homes and half a happy wife, were really more stratifying than one whole home, and a whole unhappy wife, withering in discontent” (Gilman 676). Showing that clearly the gender roles in part is what made most of Gilman’s short stories interesting and shown how the differences would somehow leave the character’s unhappy, and unsatisfied with what they truly wanted for themselves. Concluding that they either lost there minds in trying to achieve what was expected of them or to choose to get up and change their unhappiness.
To conclude, I feel that Charlotte Perkins Gilman goal was to show the gender differences in the time she lived in. She felt the need that people should have known what that time in history was like and how women were in a sense trapped by what was considered to be the norm for a women.