Also, we see in the story how the narrator feels to this lack of empathy coming from her own husband. In page 649 she says, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” John’s lack of empathy does not let him analyze and access what is going on in the mind of her wife. Instead, the narrator is suffering while John is walking around with the idea that there is no reason for her to suffer. Lastly, the narrator shares how she feels to the idea of wanting to tell John about the haunting wallpaper when she says, “I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper- he would make fun of me.
The narrator insisted to her husband that she was sick, but he never took her serious instead, he confined her in an isolated place away from home and her child. Eventually both husband and wife loose because, they are trapped in fixed gender roles and could not go against them. Works Cited Carnley, Peter. The Yellow Wallpaper and other sermons. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.
He does so by convincing her that solitude and constant bed rest is the best way to cure her problem. She is not allowed to write or do anything that would require thinking. The woman is restricted to a room where she slowly begins to go insane. Atrocious yellow wallpaper covers this room and it aids in her insanity. The woman is writing the story to express her insane thoughts against her husband's will.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s literary work “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses a dominating relationship between a husband and a compliant wife and her gradual decent into insanity. The wife, suffering from postpartum depression, is secluded from societal influences in attempts to return her to a healthier state of mind. She is not allowed to write or think in her isolated room and over a course of three months becomes more dysfunctional as she is entrapped in what she describes as a former nursery. Her determination to go against her husband’s and physician’s restrictions ultimately makes her surrender into madness because it symbolizes her escape from oppression and resistance from the treatment she is subjected to. Critics may claim that the insanity that the wife suffers from was not the cause of her treatments but existed early in her childhood and that the room in which she occupies is in an insane asylum.
This is again reinforced in the next lines when she confesses that she get “unreasonably angry” with her husband (479). She is sure that she “never use to be this way” (479). This is the effects of her suffering from postpartum depression, finally falling under a psychosis by story’s end. Jane’s condition would have likely been an embarrassment her prominent husband and explains why he is personally treating instead of having referring her to another physician. We can surmise from the text she works as a writer, but has been “absolutely forbidden to work” until she is well again (478).
181-191. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 16 Jan. 2014. Hochman, Baruch, and Ilja Wachs.
Female Marital Submission in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins "The Yellow Wallpaper" explains a woman's life in that time period, especially that of the narrator, who is living a life of a typical housewife of that time, but who is not able to cope with the oppression. Seems like the narrator fails to see her imprisoned state till towards the end of her story. The main character or the narrator is married to a doctor who is a typical male of those times. Also she has a brother who is in a similar profession as her husband. The narrator knows that she is not too well and that John - her husband does not realize the intensity of her sickness, he ignores her continuous efforts to make him aware of the real situation and her suffering.
Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. GENDREAU, B.