Works Cited Hedges, Elaine R. “Afterward” to “The Yellow Wallpaper” Old Westbury, NY. Feminist Press 1973. 12. Scharnhorst, Gary. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Her husband had control over her 'body and soul';. She felt that he lived her life for her and did 'not believe that anyone had the right to impose a private will on a fellow creature'; (Chopin 13). This control caused both women to long for freedom from their husbands' oppressive behavior. In 'The Yellow Wallpaper'; it seems that the narrator wishes to drive her husband away. She explains, 'John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
Self-destructive Self-expression in The Yellow Wallpaper In "The Yellow Wallpaper", a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the conflict centers around the protagonist's inability to maintain her sanity in a society that does not recognize her as an individual. Her husband and brother both exert their own will over hers, forcing her to conform to their pre-set impression an appropriate code of behavior for a sick woman. She has been given a "schedule prescription for each hour in the day; [John] takes all care from me" (155). This code of behavior involves virtually no exertion of her own free-will. Rather, she is expected to passively accept the fact that her own ideas are mere fancy, and only the opinions of the men in her life can be trusted.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 478-89. Print Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper." The Art of the Short Story.Ed.
The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998.
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. To make the situation worse he imposes his opinions on her even when it comes to her health. This story shows us the life and the thoughts of the narrator which lead her to be free, but go out of her mind in the sense of the real world. This story is written as if the narrator is writing it. The narrator is sick and her husband has made her a study project, She is continuously watched and thus she has no privacy.
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 quote shows the woman’s inconsistency with reality as she does not recognize that her husband had brought her to an asylum in order to “cure” her illness. Her husband explicitly explains to the woman that the place he is taking her only has “one window and not room for two beds” further displaying how he will isolate her from society and the family. Her unwillingness to realize her husbands intentions, displays her blindness to her own repression in her marriage. In addition, the woman explains how much she enjoys writing in order to explain her own thoughts and feelings because she is not allowed to say them out loud. She goes on to say that her husband,” hates to have [her] write a word” and hurriedly tries to hide away her notebook (Gilman ___).
------. "The Writing of 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Double Palimpsest." Studies in American Fiction. 17 (1989): 193-201. Haney-Peritz, Janice.
New York: Feminist Press, 1992. ------. "The Writing of 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Double Palimpsest." Studies in American Fiction. 17 (1989): 193-201.