Undermining the Patriarchy in “The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is narrated by an unnamed woman who is struggling with mental illness. Though the narrator feels she knows which actions will bring about her recovery, she is compelled to move to an old abandoned mansion and do everything that her husband thinks is best, because he is a physician and the head of her household. What unravels is a story of how upholding the patriarchy instead of trusting the woman’s intuition leads to tragic consequences, which undermines the idea of patriarchy itself. At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator explains that she is suffering from some sort of psychiatric malady, but explains that her husband Though John forbids it, the narrator records her thoughts in writing. As the story goes on, the narrative transitions from the narrator’s focus on getting better so that she can return to her roles as a wife and mother, to the focused study of the yellow wallpaper. In “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Susan S. Lanser explains that “reading or writing her self (sic) upon the wallpaper allows the narrator, as Paula Trechler puts it, to ‘escape’ her husband’s ‘sentence’ and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which, virtually all these critics have agreed, constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance” (Lanser 418). This perspective shows how the patriarchal way in which John infantilizes his wife and forces her to rest against her intuition ultimately leads to her She imagines she is a woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper; she locks the door and tears the wallpaper and creeps around the room. When John gets to her, she says, “I’ve got out at last . . . in spite of you . . . and I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman 656). In a symbol of the undermining of the patriarchy, John faints, which is the sort of thing he would have previously mocked. In this moment, he must see that his patriarchal control of his wife has ultimately backfired and tragically taken his companion and the mother of his child. This important moment undermines the patriarchy by giving the patriarchal figure a traditionally female experience. His wife then steps over him, which is also symbolic of his treatment of her. These important symbols illustrate the need for men and women to treat each other as equals, rather than superiors and inferiors. Had John simply listened to his wife, trusted her intuition, and trusted her as his equal instead of treating her as a foolish child, the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” may have had a happy ending instead of such a tragic
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper, wrote a story with a focus on mental illness; while doing so she began a feminist revolution in the late 19th century. The narrator, Jane, is attempting to break free from society’s patriarchal ideals and begins to carve a path for women of the future. While the narrator of the story may not have fully escaped, her efforts mark an act of martyrdom for women’s rights and freedom during this era.
“The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman)” embodies the idea that imprisonment in the “yellow wallpaper” room was the cause of the narrator’s absolute madness, as seen how her character changes and at the end and she no longer addresses her husband as John but “that man”. When reading the story we can see the narrator is being oppressed by her husband, “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (p.g.1). This quote shows us how the narrator is trapped and can’t express her feelings fearing her husband. The helpless sensation of oppression and being trapped leads the narrator to madness and we can witness the whole scene unfold. From her change in attitude to obsession with the wallpaper and the illusion of herself as the woman behind the wallpaper.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is first described as completely under her husband’s control. He expects her to conform to his ideals, and when her mental illness seems to be disrupting his lifestyle, he dismisses it as “really nothing the matter…but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency….” (85). This lack of support fabricates a rift between the two that pushes her further from him, and further into a fear of herself. Instead of allowing her to stay in the downstairs room with open air and a view of the garden, he insists she stay in the room with bars over the windows and a bed nailed to the floor. These images contribute to the overall tone of the story: oppressive and confining. As her time spent inside the room increases, the hallucinations she has of the walls also escalate. An obsession with the patterns and marks of the wallpaper manifests itself as a fear of the room as a whole. She describes it as “dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance the suddenly commit suicide…” (87). The personification of the wallpaper reveals her own exaggerated view of it. The narrator’s fear of her confinement is further developed with John’s ignorance towards her mental illness, creating a negative tone as she describes her
It is easy to see that there is an inherent relationship between the way John treats his wife and the effect the yellow wallpaper has on the narrator. While John certainly means no harm, his stubbornness to let the narrator have decision in her life leads her to become more depressed. As she becomes more depressed, the patterns she sees on the yellow wallpaper become more lively until she sees images of a trapped woman behind the wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper in this sense acts as a catalyst to the narrator’s mental demise. While both John and the yellow wallpaper made significant impacts on the narrator’s mental state, they were both interdependent for her eventual mental breakdown. Without her husband, the narrator’s experiences with the yellow wallpaper would not have a significant enough context of depression associated with them. Without the yellow wallpaper, there would have been no woman behind the wallpaper to ultimately cause the narrator to break down, even with the context of depression. But with viewing the wallpaper with the context of severe depression, the circumstances brought on the narrator enable her to mentally
The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story is more closely analyzed.
She secretly stays awake at night and goes to sleep during the day. Giving the image to John she is resting like he has ordered. This is also a great place of irony the author wrote. The more the narrator obsesses about the wallpaper, the deeper and deeper she falls into insanity. But her husband is happy she is getting plenty of rest during the day. He has no idea how insane his wife is becoming. The narrator has begun to see shadows of women in the pattern of the wallpaper. Women sneaking around trying to escape the wallpaper. The pattern resembles bars of a cage to the narrator. She begins to tear down the wallpaper. As she tears at the paper she see many heads. Heads of women being strangled as they try to escape the pattern. The wallpaper becomes a symbol of women trapped in domestic life, of family and tradition. In the end, the narrator reveals how much sacrifice women and herself have done breaking the chains man have placed on them. In her final speech to her husband, the readers get the sense of how much she has sacrificed. She says, "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" She is free! Free from the constraints of marriage, of society and her own
In seeing the story through the wife's eyes, we can see that her mental illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is inevitable. Between society's view of women at that time, the husband's attitude towards her, and his ineffective remedies, the wife's mental instability can only grow worse. The wallpaper lets the reader follow the woman's regression into insanity as the story progresses. Only with the first person point of view (the wife's) can the reader follow this regression of the mind. All in all, this is a sad story of a woman's struggle for sanity in an indifferent society.
...man controlling the life of the woman who must accept it, until the very end. At the end of the story, the narrator says, “I have escaped in spite of you and Jane, and I’ve pulled of most of the paper so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman, 1892, p.193). At this point the narrator made the connection between her and the woman she sees in the wallpaper and explains how she has finally escaped, suggesting her breaking out of the bars that controlled her. She shows rebellion against John when she does not open the door and makes her own choices, which not only makes her free it destroys the sense of the gender roles in the relationship, as she pretty much emasculates her husband.
The narrator and her husband moves into an old ancestral hall for the summer, however, she immediately senses an odd feeling about the place. John scoffs at her superstitions and uses his position as a doctor to dissipate anymore thoughts of the sort. Gilman writes, “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind–) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster"(Gilman 16). Gilman has cleverly taken the reader into the innermost realms of a woman’s mind and experiences, yet the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper remains anonymous, a reflection of her status in society. The role of narration plays a very important role in developing the pathway the story is told. John is part of a patriarchal old-school ideology that relegated women 's feelings to irrelevant hysterics. John would have attributed his wife 's problems to "women issues" and stress. Her ultimate craziness would have been attributed to forces outside his control as a male. Gilman also highlights the importance of first-person narration by dealing with ethos. The narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper" appears credible as the story opens, but as her mental state deteriorates, so does her credibility. In the beginning, she writes
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with the help of a high social standing as a man, the narrator’s husband controls the narrator psychologically, causing her to take on a passive role in their marriage. There is an apparent imbalance of power in the marriage between John and the unnamed narrator as can be most prominently seen through the narrator’s medical care. One of the earliest indications of this imbalance is the fact that John is also the narrator’s physician. The narrator seems to feel a sense of hopelessness when it comes to her care and her life when she highlights that John has assured her friends and relatives that she has only “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” and even writes, “what is one to do?” (66). It is problematic that John has essentially taken two positions of power because he leaves the narrator with no one to turn to. She cannot dissent her diagnosis because her status is
Finally, the yellow wallpaper presents perspectives of how men control females. As stated previously, In the story, John uses his power as a doctor to control his wife. He encaged his wife in a summer home, placing her in a room filled with barricades and many faults. As a human she is deprived of her rights and her ability to form house duties is taken away so she can rest as he calls it. Without a doubt, she fell into insanity because of the situation she was placed in. When she ripped the paper off the wall, it was a sign of freedom from her husband, and the bars that held her captive for weeks. Certainly she has a vivid imagination and being placed in bondage and unable to write which in turn lead her to mental health problems.
John did not believe that the narrator was actually suffering from an illness as it was believed that she was seeking attention. Many women in this time period when suffering from Post-Partum Depression were thought of to be attention seeking rather than ill due to the fact that it was a mental illness which is not visible. This led to the narrator only having her journal to confide in regarding her depression. As her illness progresses her journal entries become more illogical and scattered. They begin as logical and chronological accounts of her feelings and daily activities but quickly become illogical. The narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room and often notes that she sees other women in the wallpaper. Phrases such as, “But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.”, and, “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”, become frequent statements made by the narrator in her journal regarding her obsession over the pattern of the wallpaper. As time passes, the images become clearer in her mind and translate into her journal entries, this represents the progression of her illness. Eventually, she reaches her breaking point and has a complete mental breakdown. It can be argued that had the narrator been treated as an intelligent human being and been allowed to express herself outside of her journal, her illness would not have led to a mental
The conflict in her environment showed her internal conflict with her husband. A critique of “The Yellow Wallpaper” says, “[The narrator] even challenges John’s treatment of her. Yet, while one part of her may believe John wrong, another part that has internalized the negative definitions of womanhood believes that since he is the man, the doctor, and therefore the authority, then he may be right” (Magill). This internal conflict between wanting to believe herself while still living in agreement with her husband causes the narrator to doubt every move that she makes and overanalyze every detail of her life. The narrator says, “He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get” (1). The narrator’s idea that she must do everything her husband tells her forces her to doubt herself and her ability to make proper judgments for
Since society dictates that women are weak and irrational, John sees the narrator that way and misinterprets her illness. Also, by examining the authoritative way John treats the narrator, the readers obtain a better understanding of their relationship as husband and wife. In their marriage, John makes decisions on the narrator’s behalf while she is expected to be submissive. Society’s representation of women is so ingrained in John’s mind that he fails to see his wife as his equal, but instead as a weaker counterpart who is in need of a man’s wisdom and counsel. John’s narrow-minded thinking affects the narrator by giving her feelings of defeat and powerlessness. Their relationship parallels the roles that men and women play in marriage when the story was written. John’s decision to stick to his prejudiced thinking and to treat the narrator using this ‘rest cure’ leads to the narrator experiencing an intense feeling of isolation, and this isolation caused her mental decline. Her damaged mental state is evident when she says, “All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths shriek with derision!”
...rcise and John dictates, keep the large house clean, and cook, as was expected of most women during this time period. The women that we see in this story are confined to the house, expected to do whatever the male figure of the home dictates. “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows a very patriarchal society in which the women are expected to do as the man says while he works outside of the home. The narrator’s lack of a name reinforces the notion that she is speaking as the voice of women collectively, rather than as an individual.