Theme Of Love In The Yellow Wallpaper

Gilman and Stinson illustrate the reality of modeling romantic relationships off the way we were taught to love to demonstrate the idea that we accept the love we think we deserve. The Yellow Wallpaper’s author and narrator, Charlotte, has learned to love in a way that she accepts any love from her husband, John. She is always questioning her own mental illness, because of how much her physician husband downplays it. He diagnoses her with “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 648) and she agrees with defeat by asking “what is one to do?” (648). Charlotte even says one “expects that” (647) when justifying her husband laughter towards her mental instability. Similarly, in the poem Daddy, we see how a woman who has learned to love from her Hitler-like

In Daddy, Plath agrees that “every woman adores a Facist” (48) justifying her love for this man and the love that her father gave her. By using the word “Facist” we see the extent of her fathers wickedness, as he is compared to something so horrible, yet she admits that she adores that quality. In The Yellow Wallpaper, she regains some power by writing, but we see her weakness in every word. She actually believes the things John says, and he makes her feel powerless and stupid. The Yellow Wallpaper was written in 1892, where women were expected to be obedient to their husbands. In the modern day, this sense of inequality is intensified. Daddy, only being written in 1986, still presents these same ideas of inequity although a century later. Even in 2016, we have failure to rise women up to an equal status of men. In Yellow Wallpaper, we see a woman who lives in a disgusting nursery with wallpaper covered in “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” and who is forbidden to write because her husband doesn’t want her think on her own. Charlotte tells us “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” (649) John takes away his wife’s power of expression through forbidding her to

Charlotte is always speaking ironically positively of her scenario at home with John. She uses words like “beautiful” and “delicious” (648) to describe aspects of her lifestyle proving that she is merely brainwashed into believing this kind of lifestyle is beneficial to her circumstance. It is anything but beautiful. She is denial of her sickness because “John says [her] case is not serious” (648) proving she has gone mad, as she knows the magnitude of her illness. Upon staring at the wretched yellow wallpaper that Charlotte clearly dislikes, she says cheerfully, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store” (650). The irony of her excitement reveals the point of madness she has reached from being forced to reside in this room that brings her