Analysis: Colorado Woman Wins Fight To Continue Topless Gardening Work

The story "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about control. In the late 1800's, women were looked upon as having no effect on society other than bearing children and keeping house. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world dominated by males. The men held the jobs, the men held the knowledge, the men held the key to the lock known as society . . . or so they thought. The narrator in "The Wallpaper" is under this kind of control from her husband, John. Although most readers believe this story is about a woman who goes insane, it is actually about a woman’s quest for control of her life.

The narrator is diagnosed with a “nervous disorder” and is ordered by her physician, who also happens to be her husband, to abstain from most activity and all intellectual work. The same treatment Gilman was forced to take part in. The narrator is deprived of any stimulus or outlet for thought or action, and she begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper. Her discovery of the women trapped in the pattern in the wallpaper symbolizes the pattern of behaviors and practices that trap the female sex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens.

The two housewives have a passionate love for gardening and bestow their love and appreciation towards their gardens. In the twentieth century, gardening was advocated as beneficial to one’s life and family. In the New England Quarterly, the journal, “Gardening as ‘Women’s Culture’ in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Short Fiction,” states,“The time women spent in

   The story "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story about control. In the late 1800's, women were looked upon as having no effect on society other than bearing children and keeping house. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world dominated by males. The men held the jobs, the men held the knowledge, the men held the key to the lock known as society  - or so they thought. The narrator in "The Wallpaper" is under this kind of control from her husband, John. Although most readers believe this story is about a woman who goes insane, it is actually about a woman’s quest for control of her life.

The protagonist acknowledges that beyond her doorstep her own spotless regime does not operate – even the front garden is subjected to casual ‘urinators’ ‘spending a penny’ and neighbours untidy leaves.

Betty is shown as the “perfect” mother to her children, David and Jennifer, who took on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue. Betty is a mother who is shown to be selfless, always looking out for the good of her children. White men who use social power over women, to suit their own needs and desires, reinforced this definition of motherhood. The film also reinforces how White men use social power to force the idea that women like Betty are supposed to stay in the house with the kids, prepare food for the family, and have it ready for the husband when he walks in from work expecting everything to be perfect, to suit his needs and desires while he does his everyday routine. The dominant tries to keep their own values from changing by non-coercive actions, persuading women how all change “goes away,” it's just a temporary phase if it happened, it’s nothing to worry about. However, when this non-coercive approach fails as the mayor of Pleasantville puts it: it threatens the dominant masculine values of what makes this town “great”. As a response to such threat, the all-male committee of Pleasantville reinforces their ideology by using coercive actions to put women back in their place, creating laws to infuriate women and physically abusing them as one of the men tried to do to Betty. This film shows how women of the 1950’s and today are expected by men who value the dominate ideology to look beautiful at

Unlike many other romance novels, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place has aroused a plethora of academic debates ranging from the aggressive promotion of the author’s image to the themes contained within the actual narrative. Arguably the most interesting, yet elusive, theories on Peyton Place are centered on how the novel fits into the social fabric of postwar America. Many average readers, as well as literary experts, are prone to identify elements in Metalious’ novel which suggest that this cross-dressing housewife was out to subvert dominant 1950s ideology, while others will argue that the book can do nothing else but support the dominant patriarchal structure under which it was created. A closer look,

In the 20th century, the average home life in rural Oklahoma was full of hard workers in the pursuit of the picture-perfect home surrounded by plentiful land. As the sun rises over the land in the morning with a red hue, it signals the commencement of the day ahead. The farmer has already been awake since before the sun broke the horizon, preparing his little equipment and his animals for his land’s work. The farmer’s wife is in the kitchen, cooking her husband a warm breakfast as a sign of her gratitude. Their children wake, running into the kitchen, bellies growling. After gobbling up the breakfast, they run outside to play and do chores of their own. The rest of the farmer’s wife’s day is spent cleaning, cooking, and looking after the

In “A Feminist Reading of Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Gilman herself also suffered from nervous breakdown and was treated by S. Weir Mitchell, a famous nerve specialist. Her physician kept her in a big room and “he has forbidden her to touch pen to paper until she is well again” (Gilbert and Gubar 502). This story was quite actually based on her life and it still emits the pain of isolation she once felt. Similar to Gilman’s character is Elisa Allen from “The Chrysanthemums”, who is also not satisfied with her relationship with her husband. Quite comparable to the Salinas Valley, Elisa’s lifestyle is just as barren and limited to the responsibilities of her husband and her job. While she does take pride in growing the largest chrysanthemums in Salinas, her husband does not share the same respect, as proven by him continually making sarcastic jokes regarding her gardening success. Gregory j. Palmerino explains in his critique that the problems revolving around their relationship are as follows: “For everywhere is there a conflict in ‘The Chrysanthemums,’ but nowhere is there a fight. This absence of friction prevents Henry and Elisa's relationship from

The garden was something she built with her own hands just like her home that she cherishes and accomplished something that only men were viewed in the society as being able to complete such a feat. Her building and taking care of the garden shows her passion and determination in life, as it is something she crafted and learned on her own with no ones

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story is written for a reason, to demonstrate how women were treated in society in the 19th century. The first person narrator shows irrational behavior but is aware that other people find this behavior unusual as she has stated, “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I

Women’s Rights has been a point of contention for a very long time. Especially during the late 19th and 20th century, it was a seemingly unorthodox idea in a patriarchal society. This is what makes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper a feminist piece still analyzed to this day. It was a story that was arguably ahead of its time, as was Gilman, with her utopian feminist ideals. She wrote the book with some introspection of her own postpartum depression. The Yellow Wallpaper has been deemed a classic feminist literature piece due to its layers of deeper meaning, achieved through Gilman’s use of symbolism, character, and setting, construed by many to represent the struggles faced by women in the late 19th century.

“Yellow Wallpaper” as a symbol of the oppression of a woman who feels trapped in her roles as

H.D. uses images of fruit to symbolize women in order to highlight the confining character of 20th century London society. To establish the connection between women and fruit the speaker poses the question, “Have you seen fruit under cover / that wanted light—?” (Doolittle, lines 18-19). Although it may appear that the speaker is, indeed, talking about fruit, the following lines use such diction as, “wadded,” “protected,” and “smothered,” which evoke images of confinement and a guarded life (lines 20-21, 23). Since “Sheltered Garden” was published in a collection of poems in 1916, it is reasonable to make the connection that the language used calls forth the rather restricted and constrained life of

In the Declaration of Independence, the founding father Thomas Jefferson stated that “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal….” Therefore, men and women are the same, and they have the equal right to pursue their happiness. However, the equality theory is not practical, and women have been fighting for their equal rights for a long history. Back to the late nineteenth century, women’s economic and social standards are much worse than man. In the fiction “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author Charlotte Perkind Gilman, as the first person, deeply express her inner feelings, thoughts and perceptions, which truly reflects how the man dominated society destroy women’s life. The story tells us, the upper class family spend money living in a colonial mansion for three month. The women is suffering from postpartum depression, and her husband, as a physician, believes exercising, and eating can help her recovery. But the woman wants to write and goes to work, and she doesn’t like her room that covered with the queer yellow wallpaper. She is very depressed because nobody understand her, and her writing is banned by her husband, so she has nowhere to express herself. Towards the end, she sinks into false imagination of the wallpaper, and becomes a psychosis. In this story, setting, characters, and tones well illustrate that in the patriarchy society, women were undergoing sexism and they are suffering from repression and