In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, both authors provide evidence for readers to conceptualize the stories through the critical lens of feminism. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about the unnamed narrator who is taken to an ancestral home by her husband John to be treated for her nervous depression. Meanwhile, she develops a strong dislike for the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom that the narrator is restricted to. The narrator ultimately becomes hopelessly insane in hopes of relieving the women trapped by the wallpaper. Similarly, The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, a young woman who is trapped by societal standards. She struggles between the relationship of riches, love, and respect. Lily never achieves her goal of marking her status as a social elite because she overdoses and dies at the end of the novel. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Lily from The House of Mirth both struggle throughout their womanhood. Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman use different point of views to emphasize how eternal forces, such as entrapment, powerlessness, and subordinance of women ultimately lead to their overwhelming confinement in the nineteenth century society.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman immediately gives readers the most important elements at the beginning of the short fictional story. At the opening of the story, the narrator states how her husband John has brought their family to live in an ancestral home for the summer. The narrator considers the house to be strange, but John is quite too practical to see things the way that she does. He already fails to believe that the narrator is actually sick. The narrator begins to take readers on her ever-changin...
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...ness, and subordinance of the world. “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The House of Mirth essentially promote Gilman and Wharton’s demand for change, and illuminate a woman’s struggle to obtain equal possibilities in society through several different viewpoints in these notable works.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Cassill, R.V. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 5th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. Print.
Restuccia, Frances L. "The Name Of The Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(S)." Contemporary Literature 28.2 (1987): 223. Literary Reference Center. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Sommerville-Thompson, Mina L. "'Re-Viewing' Charlotte Perkin Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' Beyond Feminism." CCTE Studies 76.(2011): 33-41. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Signet Classic, 1980.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “A Feminist Reading of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” The Story and Its Writer. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. Print.
The story is Gilman’s way of throwing off the restraints of the patriarchal society so that she can do what she loves, to write and advocate for women’s rights. In her story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman challenges the roles of women in this time period; such as viewing women as children, as prisoners, as domestic house slaves, their sanity and the dangers of being the quintessential passive, submissive woman. Gilman embraces as a writer that there is more to her as a person than that of what has been shoved on her by society. She embraces feminism which by definition is the belief that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.
The psychologically thrilling story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores the dark and twisted aspect of the American society in the nineteenth century. Through the use of theme, Gilman creatively captures the cultural subordination and struggles women faced on a regular basis.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was a groundbreaking piece for its time. It not only expressed feministic views through the defiance of a male but also discussed mental illness and the inefficacy of medical treatment at the time. This fictional piece questioned and challenged the submissive role forced upon women of the 19th century and disclosed some of the mental struggles one might go through during this time of questing. Gilman shows however that even in the most horrific struggle to overcome male dominance, it is possible. She herself escapes which again shows a feminist empowerment to end the
Gilman, Charlotte P. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The story and its writer: An introduction to short fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 340-351.
Gilman describes how the narrator’s creativity is being held from her husband John. Since the narrator is ill with a “nervous” disease, he takes advantage on changing her creativity and imagination by forcing her to sacrifice her writing skills. Her husband demands the narrator resume her job as being a wife and mother. Because the narrator is restricted to write, she focused her mind on the yellow wallpaper...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"—Writing Women." EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web. Web. 05 Mar. 2011.
The narrator's declining mental health is reflected through the characteristics of the house she is trapped in and her husband, while trying to protect her, is actually destroying her. The narrator of the story goes with her doctor/husband to stay in a colonial mansion for the summer. The house is supposed to be a place where she can recover from sever postpartum depression. According to Jennifer Fleissner, "naturalist characters like the narrator of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is shown obsessed with the details of an entrapping interiority. In such an example we see naturalism's clearest alteration of previous understandings of gender: its refiguration of domestic spaces, and hence, domestic identity according to the narrative of repetitive work and compulsion that had once served to distinguish public life from a sentimentary understood home" [Fleissner 59].
Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to express her opinions about feminism and originality. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman's psychological disorder, her entire mental state characterized by her encounters with the wallpaper in her room. She incorporates imagery and symbolism to show how confined the narrator is because of her gender and mental illness.
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.
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.
Advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men, Charlotte Perkins Gilman speaks to the “female condition” in her 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by writing about the life of a woman and what caused her to lose her sanity. The narrator goes crazy due partially to her prescribed role as a woman in 1892 being severely limited. One example is her being forbidden by her husband to “work” which includes working and writing. This restricts her from begin able to express how she truly feels. While she is forbidden to work her husband on the other hand is still able to do his job as a physician. This makes the narrator inferior to her husband and males in general. The narrator is unable to be who she wants, do what she wants, and say what she wants without her husband’s permission. This causes the narrator to feel trapped and have no way out, except through the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom.
In the texts: “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “The Valley of Childish Things” by Edith Wharton, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female authors bring attention to the egregious cliche belief of men being more superior than women and of women having to be obedient, well mannered housewives. This common belief that men and society hold causes women to become discouraged to chase after their dreams, depressed from their lack of freedom, and insane, as demonstrated in the texts. The authors employ the literary devices: imagery, symbolism, allegory, and irony, to further substantiate the harm caused by female oppression during the 18th and 19th century. Although the texts are written about the oppression of women during the 18th and 19th century, it is salient to note that female oppression will continue to happen in the future due to the ingrained misconception of women being worth less than males and the dominance that many males feel they need. Female oppression is an issue that will always be talked about no matter the time
Traditionally, men have held the power in society. Women have been treated as a second class of citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Feminist criticism contends that literature either supports society’s patriarchal structure or provides social criticism in order to change this hierarchy. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts one women’s struggle against the traditional female role into which society attempts to force her and the societal reaction to this act.