Analysis Of Gothic Realism In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Charlotte Gilman’s goal in her life was to improve the human race. Being one of the most influential feminist writers in her time, Gilman strived to enlighten society of the unfair injustice that surrounded the gender roles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During a time when her achievements were exceptional for women, she served as a heroine for future generations of feminists because of her unconventional approach to life that shaped Gothic Realism. In her writings, Gilman typically addressed the economic dependency of women upon men, which was included in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman speaks on the malpractice and the gender-biased behaviors that began to develop between the …show more content…

Quawas goes on to say that women in that time period are to have the four attributions of true womanhood being “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (35). She argues that Gilman attends to demolish the ‘domestic sphere’ and work for her own rights as well as the women around her. Gilman stood for the power of womanhood and struggled to free herself from the stereotypical ideal of women. Quawas believes that Gilman is before her own time, commenting that she defied cultural stereotypes and patriarchal assumptions, which was taboo at the time. However, for Gilman, the norm of the nineteenth-century middle-class marriage was the “domestic” everyday customs of the female and the “active” work of the male, which ensured that women remained second-class citizens compared to that of men. “By showing women rebelling against the dominant feminine ideal in Victorian culture, the fiction of Gilman broke with a nineteenth-century literary tradition that essentially upheld domestic ideology,” (Quawas 38). Gilman ignores the accustom “Victorian values”, such as refusing to marry or leaving their husband and instead, characterizes her heroines as gaining their own financial autonomy or marrying if they found a partner that is willing to support their

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