Essay On Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Victorian Gender Roles in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The Victorian Era was a time of men’s success and women’s suffrage. Men pursued their dreams and women watched the children. In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Grimm exposes the truth about victorian gender roles affect both men and women.
Victorian men were successful and in control of the household. John, the narrator’s husband, is a “very careful and loving” (2) who shows love for his wife by hiding her away in an attic because she is unwell and sick. Regardless that the narrator claims, John denies her freedom and access to society because he is “a doctor dear, and knows”(9) best. John also asserts his power over his wife whenever he threatens that if his wife “does not pick up faster, he shall send me to Weird Mitchell in the fall”(6) even though she does not want to go. For example, when the narrator struggles to stay calm, she believes that “put fireworks in [her] pillowcase”(4) if she attempted to socialize. John is the ideal …show more content…

She cannot handle the “effort it is to be able to dress, to entertain, and order things”(30). These are basic things a victorian woman are expected to do, yet she struggles. She continues to fail her role by writing in a journal, having “silly fancies”(8), “creeps by daylight”(12) and is mentally unstable. Women are supposed to be perfect, child bearing trophies for their successful husbands. They are meant to be flaunted in society, but the narrator is locked away in a yellow wallpapered attic under the watchful eye of a caretaker. The only way she succeeds in her victorian gender role is her dependence on her husband. The narrator can not do anything or make any decisions without John’s approval. In addition, Gilman’s decision to leave the narrator unnamed can symbolizes the narrator not as an individual but representative of all victorian women struggling with her expected gender

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