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The yellow wallpaper and the struggle with self expression
The feminism in the yellow wallpaper
The feminism in the yellow wallpaper
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The Yellow Wallpaper
Today, women have more freedoms than we did in the early nineteenth century. We have the right to vote, seek positions that are normally meant for men, and most of all, the right to use our minds. However, for women in the late 1800’s, they were brought up to be submissive housewives who were not allowed to express their own interests. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman is isolated from the world and her family because she is suffering from a temporary illness. Under her husband’s care, she undergoes a treatment called “rest cure” prescribed by her doctor, Dr. Weir Mitchell. It includes bed rest, no emotional or physical stimulus, and limited access to people. However, due to isolation, the woman creates a delusional relationship with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. It’s patterns stand for everything that is going on in her current life. She is a lonely woman who yearns to escape the walls around her and be free.
As the story begins, the woman in the story is suffering from temporary nervous depression and has just been released from a sanitarium. Because she is ill, her husband John has been given instructions from her doctor on how to help her recuperate. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly let’s [his wife] stir without special direction” (Gilman, 451). This treatment confines her to her room upstairs. She is also required to have plenty of bed rest and is restricted from people and stimulation. However, one can say that such instructions will cause the illness to continue because of a lack of activity, isolation from the outside world, especially family members. It appears the woman in the story wants to ...
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...rld and the woman represents her. Ultimately, John’s wife concludes that her only escape from the room is to tear down the wallpaper. In doing so, she releases herself and takes control of her life.
Gilman has based this story on her own experience. She gives readers a glimpse on how women were restricted from mental stimulus and creative thinking because they were forced to conform to societies’ norms. The woman in the story is a prime example of how women were denied participation in their own marriage.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 1892. pgs. 450-461.
Johnson, Greg. Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in “The Yellow Wallpaper,”
in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol.26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pg. 521-30.
Korb, Rena. An Overview of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in Exploring Short Stories, Gale Research, 1998.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” has opened many people’s eyes since it was first published in 1892. In the beginning readers only acknowledged Gilman’s story as showing how women with mental illnesses were treated by physicians during the 1800’s. They overlooked the deeper meaning the text contained, and it was not until later that readers discovered it. Eventually, “The Yellow Wallpaper” became known as feminist literature. Gilman does a great job showing how women suffered from inadequate medical treatment, but above that she depicts how nineteenth century women were trapped in their roles in society and yearned to escape from being controlled by males.
The narrator, a new mother, is revoked of her freedom to live a free life and denied the fact that she is “sick”, perhaps with postpartum depression, by her husband, a physician, who believes whatever sorrows she is feeling now will pass over soon. The problematic part of this narrative is that this woman is not only kept isolated in a room she wishes to have nothing to do with, but her creative expression is revoked by her husband as we can see when she writes: “there comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word (Gilman,
The narrator, referred to as Jane, has been suffering from what her husband, who is a physician, believes is a “temporary nervous depression.” He prescribes a “rest cure”
During the Nineteenth Century, the gender roles were greatly divided. Women were seen to have a completely differently status and nature from men. The stereotypical woman during this time-period was dependent, passive, domestic, and far weaker then a man. Men on the other hand, were far more dominant, dependent, controlling, ambitious and active. Men were the protectors and providers for the family. As if women weren’t already inferior enough to men, when they got married, essentially everything that was theirs was striped from them. What she once owned, was now her husbands, this included her savings, her land, her slaves, her freedom and especially her independence (Steele and Brislen). Women were expected to just do their household duties and be content with their lives and want nothing more. This lead wives to live in the shadows of their spouse. It is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist writer of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century who illustrates the discord of the gender roles of this time-period. One of her most famed writings is “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In this short story, we read about a spouse who is totally dominated by her husband John, and we follow her while she is away rejuvenating herself from an illness. Feministic literature of this time, really focuses on the inferiority of women against men.
The unnamed narrator finds herself trapped within a large room lined with yellow wallpaper and hidden away from all visitors by her husband-physician John. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a summer spent in the large ancestral hall to find healing through rest turns into the manic changes of her mind. The overbearing nature of her husband inspires a program designed to make her better; ironically, her mind takes a turn for the worse when she believes the wallpaper has come to life. In Janice Haney-Peritz’s “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ ”, she tells that until 1973, Gilman’s story was not seen with a feminist outlook. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was misunderstood and unappreciated when it was published. The patriarchal attitudes of men in this era often left women feeling they had no voice and were trapped in their situations. Although originally interpreted as a horror of insanity, this initial perspective misses the broad, provocative feminist movement that Gilman supported. With the changes in perspective, over time this work has come to have a voice for women and the husband-wife relationship through the theme of feminism.
The room becomes the woman’s world because he cannot leave. The yellow wallpaper represents her fear of being trapped. It also is the very thing causing her imprisonment inside the room. The narrator says “At the night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamp light, and worst of all by moon light it becomes bars!” (Gilman 662). Every night she lies awake and looks at her cell of a room as her eyes roam around the wallpaper. At the beginning she hates the wallpaper but becomes infatuated with it as the woman continues to try to get out. “ ‘nobody could climb through that pattern it strangles so…strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white’… If this can be seen as a metaphor of women’s oppression and death in the limited domestic space” (Fanghui). The woman could end up feeling useless, “suffocated” (Fanghui), and so closed off and commit suicide. The restraints used against her could be her downfall. She has become “possessive about the wallpaper” (Rao) because she feels “it is here property” (Rao). She no longer feels the need to leave because she has not found a way out yet. Once the narrator “freed the woman in the wallpaper” (Rao) she became insane (Rao). She says “I wonder if they all came out of the wallpaper, as I did?” (Gilman 665). She no longer sees the trapped behind the wallpaper as someone else but herself. She has been alone in for weeks trapped in the room with
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s tantalizing short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the horrifying tale of a nineteenth century woman whose husband condemns her to a rest cure, a popular approach during the era to treat post-partum depression. Although John, the unnamed narrator’s husband, does not truly believe his wife is ill, he ultimately condemns her to mental insanity through his treatment. The story somewhat resembles Gilman’s shocking personal biography, namely the rest cure she underwent under the watchful eye of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, two years after the birth of her daughter, Katherine. Superficially, the rest cure the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" endures loosely replicates Gilman’s personal anguish as she underwent such a treatment. More complexly, however, the story both accentuates and indirectly criticizes the oppression women faced in both marriage and motherhood.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tells the story of a woman's descent into madness as a result of the "rest and ignore the problem cure" that is frequently prescribed to cure hysteria and nervous conditions in women. More importantly, the story is about control and attacks the role of women in society. The narrator of the story is symbolic for all women in the late 1800s, a prisoner of a confining society. Women are expected to bear children, keep house and do only as they are told. Since men are privileged enough to have education, they hold jobs and make all the decisions. Thus, women are cast into the prison of acquiescence because they live in a world dominated by men. Since men suppress women, John, the narrator's husband, is presumed to have control over the protagonist. Gilman, however, suggests otherwise. She implies that it is a combination of society's control as well as the woman's personal weakness that contribute to the suppression of women. These two factors result in the woman's inability to make her own decisions and voice opposition to men.
After one failed marriage with a child, Charlotte did not believe that there was much left for her. Charlotte took her emotions and construed them into a positive thing, her writing. Just like the woman in the story, “The Yellow Wall-paper”, Charlotte was sick. The doctors prescribed the “rest cure” for Charlotte. This prescription meant that she had to stay in bed for weeks on end, and had to limit her intellectual activities (Gilman 831). Charlotte was also instructed to live as much of a domestic life as she could. The doctors and her husband wanted her to stay home to cook, clean, and tend to their child. Staying in your own house, in your own bed for that long of a time would drive any person the slightest bit of crazy. During this time is when Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “The Yellow Wall-paper”.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story told from the first person point of view of a doctor's wife who has nervous condition. The first person standpoint gives the reader access only to the woman’s thoughts, and thus, is limited. The limited viewpoint of this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the wife feels throughout the story. The point of view is also limited in that the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no benefit of hindsight, and is never able to actually see that the men in her life are part of the reason she never gets well. This paper will discuss how Gilman’s choice of point of view helps communicate the central theme of the story- that women of the time were viewed as being subordinate to men. Also, the paper will discuss how ignoring oneself and one’s desires is self-destructive, as seen throughout the story as the woman’s condition worsens while she is in isolation, in the room with the yellow wallpaper, and her at the same time as her thoughts are being oppressed by her husband and brother.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman experienced a relatively similar life story to the life of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. She was prescribed the same “rest cure” as the narrator that subsequently led to a mental breakdown. The prescribed “rest cure” entails minimal human contact, repressed imagination, and female confinement. Comparatively, persistently being told that you are insane especially if you’re not, may drive someone to actually become psychotic.
"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 1). Many women in the 1800's and 1900's faced hardship when it came to standing up for themselves to their fathers, brothers and then husbands. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator of the story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", is married to a physician, who rented a colonial house for the summer to nurse her back to health after her husband thinks she has neurasthenia, but actually suffers from postpartum depression. He suggested the 'rest cure'. She should not be doing any sort of mental or major physical activity, her only job was to relax and not worry about anything. Charlotte was a writer and missed writing. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is significant to literature in the sense that, the author addresses the issues of the rest cure that Dr. S. Weir Mitchell prescribed for his patients, especially to women with neurasthenia, is ineffective and leads to severe depression. This paper includes the life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in relation to women rights and her contribution to literature as one of her best short story writings.
Advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men, Charlotte Perkins Gilman speaks to the “female condition” in her 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by writing about the life of a woman and what caused her to lose her sanity. The narrator goes crazy due partially to her prescribed role as a woman in 1892 being severely limited. One example is her being forbidden by her husband to “work” which includes working and writing. This restricts her from begin able to express how she truly feels. While she is forbidden to work her husband on the other hand is still able to do his job as a physician. This makes the narrator inferior to her husband and males in general. The narrator is unable to be who she wants, do what she wants, and say what she wants without her husband’s permission. This causes the narrator to feel trapped and have no way out, except through the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom.
Gilman shows through this theme that when one is forced to stay mentally inactive can only lead to mental self-destruction. The narrator is forced into a room and told to be passive, she is not allowed to have visitors, or write, or do much at all besides sleep. Her husband believes that a resting cure will rid her of her “slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 478). Without the means to express herself or exercise her mind in anyway the narrator begins to delve deeper and deeper into her fantasies. The narrator begins to keep a secret journal, about which she states “And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief” (Gilman 483)! John tells his wife that she must control her imagination, lest it run away with her. In this way John has asserted full and complete dominance over his wife. The narrator, though an equal adult to her husband, is reduced to an infancy. In this state the narrator begins her slow descent into hysteria, for in her effort to understand herself she fully and completely loses herself.
Home, in contemporary literature, often plays an integral role often symbolizing security, unison, and support; although, things were not always this way. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts the all-too-real struggle many women faced in the nineteenth century and earlier. This short passage portrays the narrative of female intellectual oppression – an examination of nineteenth century social mores. The passage voices the common practice of diagnosing women with “rest cure” who displayed symptoms of depression and anxiety with a supposed treatment of lying in bed for several weeks, allowing no more than twenty minutes of intellectual application per day. Women, at this time, were considered to be the second sex – weaker and more fragile, unable to grapple the same daily activities as men – and such the “rest cure” prevents women from using any form of thinking, trusting the notion that naturally the female mind is empty. Not even were