Role Of Women In The Yellow Wallpaper

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, "It 's a girl." “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story engages stereotypes of women in society. In the story, Gilman introduces us to the character Jane, who happens to be the narrator of the short story, as a sick individual experiencing physical pain. However, not only is she sick physically, one can see that she is disturbed about the society’s views of women. Gilman also introduces us to the character John, who is the narrator’s husband and doctor. John’s role in the story appears to be the role of a patriarch because he basically overpowers the narrator and hinders her from expressing

Gilman used John to portray a state of oppression. Janice Haney-Peritz stated that according to the feminist methodology, “the traditional roles of women are constricted to patriarchal order, in which masculine ways of thinking are privileged” ( Haney-Peritz 113). This theory gives the opportunity to be able to identify the misrepresentations of women’s role in society and helps one to look for social misconceptions that treat masculine behaviour as a norm and feminine viewpoint as a deviation. Regarding to the “Yellow Wallpaper”, John confines the narrator to a room, which taunts her. John banned her from performing any tasks, which included her writing. Consequently, this attitude explains two obvious roles: The narrator’s husband, who obviously represents “law, order, and authority” (Suess 79), and the narrator who is bound to play the role of a good wife. Throughout the text, one can see that Gilman uses the narrator to illustrate the perception of how women were treated, and their roles in society. Melissa Wright stated that “Feminism illustrated the status of men and women in society, and the main goal is to use these awarenesses, and knowledge gained to improve women’s lives, and their role in society (Wright 826). During the time period in which the story was written, men were the ones that ruled, and the women obeyed. “So I take

Although, in the text, one can see that the narrator really wants to make her husband happy, restrain from doing anything that displeases him, and accept the role as an ideal wife, but she is not able to balance her husbands needs with her desire to want to express herself creatively especially by writing. In the text the narrator is forbidden to wright, but still she secretly writes. Close to the ending of the story, the narrator begins to identify herself as the woman in the yellow wallpaper. She felt that the image is a clear representation of her life. “And it is a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Gilman 961). The female in the wallpaper seems to be trapped and trying to escape the pattern that imprisons her. Very similar to the image this wallpaper, the narrator is also trying to escape the pattern of the Cult of True Womanhood. The narrator came to a realization that both she and the woman in the wallpaper are suffering from oppression and imprisonment. She frees the woman by peeling the image off the wall, and as she does so, she feels like she has liberated herself. The narrator said “... there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast” (Gilman 967). This quote shows that the