Gender Role In The Yellow Wall, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We live in a society that sets specific guidelines for women and men, which most are considered to be double standards. In the nineteenth century a woman’s role in the house was determined by a man, and her health was at the mercy of a male dominated medical field. In The Yellow Wall-paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, shows how gender roles assigned by a male dominated society can harm the man and woman relationship. I will discuss how Gilman uses gender role to show how a woman is misunderstood medically and how this can silence a women’s voice. It also show’s how these assigned roles can trap men and women from progressing.
In this short story we have a female narrator and the focus is on her condition, hysteria, and how she slowly but surely losses grips to reality, a psychic suicide, and how her husband John a medical physician is misunderstanding his wife’s condition and the use of his inappropriate treatment of confining her to a room and to rest. John can be thought as being the coherent thinker, while the female narrator can be thought of as a pushover without questioning him. This sets the tone of the story because it shows us who is in control and who is the weaker of the two. We see this in the beginning of the story when she states, “If a physician of high standing and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?” (Gilman 792). This line speaks volumes because it shows how much faith she put in her husband’s word as well as his professional opinion. As Susan P. Penfold and Gillian Walker suggested in their worked titled Women and the Psychiatric Paradox, “Historically, women have long be...

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...ng to just do as John said and believed that everything he said was right, she may have been able to stand up for herself more. This would have enabled her to question her husband and maybe seek the help she really needed. But she did not question, for she thought it was not a women’s place to do so, and she indicates that by saying, “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” (Gilman 797). She unsurprisingly goes with flow because she thinks he is right. The narrator goes crazy not just because her husband has misread her illness but also because they both believe John is right. In this battle no one won, from John’s righteousness, they were defeated by the fixed gender roles that society has put in place.
Ultimately Gilman wanted to express the unjust acts placed upon women when it comes to their health.