The Yellow Wall-Paper

“A life of feminine submission, of ‘contemplative purity,’ is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of ‘significant action,’ is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story” (Gilbert & Gubar, 609). This quote demonstrates women’s suppression, and how it is wrong. It refers to how they were treated before feminist movements of the 20th century. Contemporary assumptions at this time on the proper relationship between women and men, as well as women’s supposedly intrinsic nature and traits, had informed and infused the representations of women (Filipowics, 7). These representations served as metaphors for the inequality in political and social order (Filipowics,

These copies, however, were free of copyright restraints, and therefore, were altered via the editor’s discrimination (St. Jean, 397). The one surviving manuscript, though, was printed in 1892 in the New England Magazine, and is the only copy with authority (St. Jean, 400). However, it wasn’t until the Feminist Press edition that the feminist movements caught on to the story. Perhaps, though, it was because of these feminist movements that the story was printed in the Feminist Press, in order to assist the movements against women’s

Simone de Beauvoir, a leader in feminism in the twentieth century, believed that “women must define themselves, articulate their own social constructs of what it means to be a woman, and reject being labeled as the Other” (Bressler 150). Because of this negative and repressing view on women, advocates have begun to fight for women's rights to be just as equal as men's rights. Women were oppressed by men, and it wasn’t until radical feminism showed this through their model of class oppression (Brannon, 2011). Once females were able to get a little bit of rights, cultural feminists showed their opinions on how women would make the world a better place with their more caring and compassionate natures, unlike men (Brannon, 2011). Works such as The Yellow Wallpaper started a backbone for feminist studies, which led to feminist literary criticism. Bressler states that “As one of the most significant developments in literary studies in the second half of the twentieth century, feminist literary criticism advocates equal rights for all women (indeed, all peoples) in all areas of life: socially, politically, professionally, personally, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically” (144). This story helped to show that women in this time period were not given any of these rights, and because of the way