Too Terribly Good To Be Printed By Conrad Shumaker

Britnee Thompson

Crossgrove

ENG 210-01

February 25,2017

Summary and Analysis of “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”

“Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper” by Conrad Shumaker was written in 1985. When the original “Yellow Wallpaper” was created it was during the Victorian Era also the beginning of the Feminist Movement. Shumaker’s “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed” proves that the audiences’ intake of the story is merely based off of society’s standards at the time. This story emphasizes that the pedestal women are held on will always be over powered by society because of how dominate male roles are. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Shumaker explains that gender roles are heavily influenced by how the way humans think. Males tend to focus more on facts and reality where as women like to use imagination and creativity. The author is able to prove this theory correct because the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses herself with her imagination of a non-living item (the wallpaper) and John her husband takes her thoughts for insanity. Shumaker gets the readers to realize that John himself isn’t cruel to his wife but it is the influence of the society. If having an imagination wasn’t such a feminine thing to do, then the wives of that century wouldn’t have gone through so much. This story brings to light that there is more to “The Yellow Wallpaper” than a husband controlling

his wife it is the significance that society has placed on gender roles making the man more dominant than a woman.

Shumaker’s goal was to explain to readers that the wallpaper in the room of “The Yellow

Wallpaper” wasn’t just a symbol of the narrator’s freedom it was a symbol of the confinements of women in the 19th century.
Conrad Shumaker’s “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper” is an analysis of how the actions of men and women were influenced by society. John the husband of the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is put out to be rational and materialistic and the narrator is imaginative and emotional. When John puts his wife on the rest cure the narrator uses her imagination to express her freedom through the wallpaper in her room. Since John isn’t able to think with imagination he believes that his wife is only getting crazier. “The question of women’s role in the nineteenth century is more extricable bound up with the questions of how one perceives the world” (Shumaker 589). As a result of John not being able to comprehend his wife’s artistic imagination he has great difficulty relating to her. With this quote Shumaker brings to the audience’s attention that not only John but most men think realistic whereas the women think with sentiment. “woman is often seen as representing an imaginative or “poetic” view of things that conflicts the American male’s “common sense” approach to reality” (Shumaker 589). This suggests that it is hard for the genders to feel equal to each other because society is set up to think that imagination and feelings are weak making it easy for men to be in dominancy. Shumaker challenges the audience to think about “What happens to the imagination when it’s defined as feminine (and thus weak) and has to face a society that values the useful and the practical and rejects anything else as non-sense?” (Shumaker 590). In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is labeled sick by her husband and to help cure her “sickness” her husband reassures her that if she gives into her imaginative thoughts she will only get worse. In reality, Shumaker’s theory of society’s gender roles proves that he doesn’t want her to be imaginative because if she is he won’t know how to deal with them because to him it is unrealistic. “John wants to deal only with physical cause and effects: if his wife’s symptoms are nervousness and weight loss, the treatment must be undisturbed tranquility and good nutrition” (Shumaker 591). Society has instilled into women and men that men knows what is best because of how rationally men think. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator goes along with what her husband prescribes for her to get better because she knows that of she expresses how she feels to anyone else they will still believe her husband because her thoughts are inferior to his. Despite the narrator being the one who is sick her opinions on her life serves no value. All in all, the 19th century society was imprisonment by men created for women that was inflexible for women to escape.

Works Cited
Shumaker, Conrad. “‘Too Terribly Good to Be Printed’: Charlotte Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” American Literature, vol. 57, no. 4, 1985, pp. 588–599