Oppression of Women in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

1138 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Feminism in awakening kate chopin

Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin’s work The Awakening as well as the nameless female narrator of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper both experienced similar forms of gendered oppression, who have become frustrated with their conventional womanly roles. In having like experiences, these literary works prove effective in relaying the issue of gender inequalities among men and women in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Although both Chopin and Gilman’s portrayal of their character’s dissatisfaction with women’s societal roles resemble one another in more than one way and they both fight for their autonomy, they do differ in the types of independence from a patriarchal society they strive to separate from. The nameless narrator of Gilman’s story fights against the mental suppression that she experiences because of her illness—namely from her husband and doctor, John. Edna from Chopin’s The Awakening fights for a physical independence from her husband and children. In this essay I will explain the ways in which both of these characters are oppressed in a male-dominant society, as well as their attempts to convey their frustration, and the different kinds of independence strove they achieve.

The nameless narrator of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper suffers from a mental illness that she refers to as “Hysteria.” This type of hysteria that she experiences is a nervous exhaustion that can only be cured by the removal of oneself from all types of stimulation—essentially, bed rest. Needing a little more insight into this “Hysteria” that the narrator was diagnosed with, I read a chapter entitled “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” from a book by Paula Treichler. According to Treichler,...

... middle of paper ...

...s that the Narrator has, is her attempt at trying to gain control of her mental state in which she has been trapped for so long.

While the Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper strove for independence from the mental suppression she was placed under, Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin’s story The Awakening fought for physical autonomy from her husband and children. The belief that women of the late 1800s were expected to remain in the domestic sphere and care for their families first before themselves was expected. In doing so they were unable to think of their own wants or desires before that of their families’. The Awakening highlights the physical aspects of feminine roles in this patriarchal society.

Works Cited

Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 2011. Print.

Show More
Related

  • Comparing the Plots of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Story of an Hour

    874 Words  | 2 Pages

    Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 2011. Print.

    Read More

  • Frances Porcher's Response To The Awakening

    335 Words  | 1 Pages

    In Frances Porcher’s response to “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin published in May 1899, she felt as though the book is slightly pathetic. While she believes that one can get absorbed by the principles of the book, she writes that the story makes one feel like “it leaves one sick of human nature and so one feels cui bono!” Furthermore, in Porcher’s analysis, the book “is not a pleasant picture of soul-dissection.” The distress of Edna does not allow one to joyfully engage in the plight that is exhibited. In addition to ugly cross-section, the book makes readers feel, “for the moment, with a little sick feeling, if all women are like the one” that is studied in the book. While it is disheartening to read that women might feel this way about the

    Read More

  • A Feminist in Action in The Yellow Wallpaper

    1794 Words  | 4 Pages

    "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician.   Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time.  As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing.  Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition.  The restrictions which society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria.  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.

    Read More

  • feminaw Suicide as the Only Alternative for Edna Pontellier in The Awakening

    945 Words  | 2 Pages

    Critics of Kate Chopin's The Awakening tend to read the novel as the dramatization of a woman's struggle to achieve selfhood--a struggle doomed failure either because the patriarchal conventions of her society restrict freedom, or because the ideal of selfhood that she pursue is a masculine defined one that allows for none of the physical and undeniable claims which maternity makes upon women. Ultimately. in both views, Edna Pontellier ends her life because she cannot have it both ways: given her time, place, and notion of self, she cannot be a mother and have a self. (Simons)

    Read More

  • The Language and Syntax of The Yellow Wallpaper

    891 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the minute you read the read the first paragraph until you finish the last sentence, Charlotte Gilman captures her reader s attention as her character documents her own journey into insanity in The Yellow Wallpaper.   As her character passes a seemingly indefinite amount of time, it becomes clear that her husband s treatment is affecting her.  Gilman is able convey the narrator s changing mental state through language and syntax.

    Read More

  • Female Roles In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    545 Words  | 2 Pages

    “The Awakening” is a courageous piece of literature work that demonstrates how civilization forced tremendously elevated expectancies for females and their hypothetical roles. Kate Chopin uses this novel to bring those “expected roles” to light. Edith Wharton also shows how this epidemic has restricted and impaired two of the protagonist in her story “Roman Fever”. During the time period that this book was written, in the early nineteenth century, this epidemic of forcing roles on women was widespread, and this altered the lives of these women in an abysmal way incessantly.

    Read More

  • The Feminist Movement In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    806 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Awakening, Kate Chopin tells a story during the upbringing of the feminist movement, the movement was masked by the social attitudes entering into the 1900’s. She tells this story in the form of a novel, in which is told in a third person view, that is very sympathetic for Edna Pontellier, the protagonist. This is a review of the journey Edna takes in her awakening and evaluate the effectiveness this novel takes in introducing, continuing, and ending Edna’s awakening.

    Read More

  • The Movement for Women's Rights Inside The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    1638 Words  | 4 Pages

    Women have been mistreated, enchained and dominated by men for most part of the human history. Until the second half of the twentieth century, there was great inequality between the social and economic conditions of men and women (Pearson Education). The battle for women's emancipation, however, had started in 1848 by the first women's rights convention, which was led by some remarkable and brave women (Pearson Education). One of the most notable feminists of that period was the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was also one of the most influential feminists who felt strongly about and spoke frequently on the nineteenth-century lives for women. Her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" characterizes the condition of women of the nineteenth century through the main character’s life and actions in the text. It is considered to be one of the most influential pieces because of its realism and prime examples of treatment of women in that time. This essay analyzes issues the protagonist goes through while she is trying to break the element of barter from her marriage and love with her husband. This relationship status was very common between nineteenth-century women and their husbands.

    Read More

  • Expectations For Women In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    1157 Words  | 3 Pages

    Society of the 19th century gave a heightened meaning to what it meant to be a women. According to the commonly known “code of true womanhood” women are supposed to be docile, domestic creations whose main concerns in life were to be raising children and submissiveness to their husbands. In the book The Awakening written by Kate Chopin; introduces the protagonist, Edna Pontellier a rebellious twenty-eight year old woman who is dissatisfied with the role of being a wife and mother, a woman who desires independence and sexual freedom. She soon discovers she doesn’t quite fit into the role that has been given to her. Through the use of symbolism, imagery, and irony. Chopin exposes expectations for women in order to be accepted during the Victorian

    Read More

  • Showalter’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening

    598 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book,” Elaine Showalter makes a compelling argument that “Edna Pontellier’s ‘unfocused yearning’ for an autonomous life is akin to Kate Chopin’s yearning to write works that go beyond female plots and feminine endings” (204). Urging her reader to read The Awakening “in the context of literary tradition,” Showalter demonstrates the ways in which Chopin’s novel both builds upon and departs from the tradition of American women’s writing up to that point. Showalter begins with the antebellum novelists’ themes of women’s roles as mothers—especially the importance of the mother-daughter relationship—and women’s attachments with one another and then moves to the local colorists of the post-Civil War who claimed male and female models but who wrote that motherhood was not a suitable partner for the true artist. According to these women writers, a woman had to choose to be either an artist or a wife and mother; one negatively affected the other. The literary history then delves...

    Read More

  • The Relationship of The Yellow Wallpaper to the Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    1118 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 2011. Print.

    Read More

  • Yellow Wallpaper: Beyond The Wall

    1031 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. 354-65. Print.

    Read More

  • Treatment of Mental Disorders Exposed in The Yellow Wallpaper

    1986 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has fabricated that includes a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator of this story grows obsessed with the wallpaper in her room because her husband minimizes her exposure to the outside world and maximizes her rest. Academic essayists such as Susan M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter have a feminist reading of the story, however, this is not the most important reading. The author experienced the turmoil of the rest cure personally, which means that the story is most likely a comment on the great mistreatment of depression, hysteria and mental disorders in general. Despite the claims of Gilbert, Gubar, and Showalter that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is solely feminist propaganda, their analysis is often unnecessarily deep and their claims are often unwarranted, resulting in an inaccurate description of a story that is most importantly about the general mistreatment of psychosis and the descent into insanity regardless of gender.

    Read More

  • Awakening

    2436 Words  | 5 Pages

    When Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the author's defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopin's own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the book's end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of sensitivity who believes that her identity as a woman involves more than being a wife and mother. It is this very type of independent thinking which was viewed as heretical in a society which sought to deny women any meaningful participation.

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

    861 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Literature a World of Writing: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. Ed. David Pike, and Ana Acosta. New York: Longman, 2011. 543-51. Print.

    Read More

More about Oppression of Women in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Open Document