Analysis Of `` August Showers `` By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

During the late 19th and early 20th century in America, the rise of Feminism challenged the traditional gender roles. The female authors of this time period represented realistic aspects of women’s struggles, which often reflected limitations from society and their own lives. The three female authors who advocated women’s struggles in their writings were Sojourner Truth, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. In the speech to the American Equal Rights Association, Truth reveals that women do not have rights to present their voices in the court. Cather addresses women’s devastating labor life after the marriage in “A Wagner Matinee.” Likewise, in “April Shower”, Wharton portrays men’s criticism upon economically successful women. American female authors of the late 19th and early 20th century demonstrates the ideas of Feminism by men objecting to representation in politics, prohibiting career over marriage, and criticizing economic self-sufficiency.

In this essay I will discuss and analyze the social forces that influenced American women writers of the period of 1865 to 1912. I will describe the specific roles female authors played in this period and explain how the perspectives of female authors differed from their male contemporaries.

Women struggled with society to gain status equal to men and their efforts were found in many literary works..  Famous authors such as Mary Wollestonecraft, Alice Walker, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself published works that expressed these views and served as a creative outlet similar to the narrator of 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'

Throughout the history of American Literature there has been a common theme of male oppression. Especially towards the end of the 19th century, before the first wave of feminism, women were faced with an unshakeable social prison. Husband, home and children were the only life they knew, many encouraged not to work. That being said, many female writers at the time, including Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were determined to examine the mind behind the American woman, through the lens of mental illness and personal experience.

Feminism is considered an important aspect of “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf and also “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both short stories were set in the 1800s during the time where feminism was fought for since women were denied education, could not own their own property, and were expected to care for their husbands and children with complete disregard to themselves. The conventional 19th century norm had a rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male; this ensured women remained second class citizens. In “The Mark on the Wall,” the manly figure reveals the mark on the wall was in reality a snail. The woman doesn’t get up to see if the mark was really a snail, but instead, accepts what her husband says. The man character forces the woman to see reality the way he does, even if she doesn’t want to. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” gender division has the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and prevents their full development. John’s assumptions of his superiority lead him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. Woolf and Gilman use madness to define an essential part of the reality of women in the 1800s.

Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.

Ever since the days of World War I, women have been seen as second rate to men. They had to live up to many social standards that men didn’t have to and had strict guidelines on how to live their lives. This all changed when modernism deliberately tried to break away from Victorian Era standards in which women were subjugated to a lot more scrutiny. Ezra Pound, who was a large figure in the modernist movement, captured the spirit of the era in his famous line “Make it new!” Consequently, many writers started to experiment with many different and wild writing styles, which led to the short stories and poems we have today. The stories The Wife of His Youth and Mrs. Spring Fragrance were all written in this era of modernism. While they are written in a more traditional style of writing, both these stories have strong implications on feminism from the viewpoints of both male and female writers.

The nineteenth century oversaw women like Harriet Jacobs and Kate Chopin developing narratives which notably resisted the customary feminist roles in the home. Each of these narratives entails a female protagonist who is looking to escape and attain freedom. With many critics debating about their source of dissatisfaction, the final resort, women refusing to conform to the role of a devoted wife, provided authoritative and subversive texts to the advice literature that was popularized at the turn of the century.

During the nineteenth and twentieth century there was a number of changes made in America. Woman were looked at as less than back then and to a certain degree they still are today. There was a number of women that died or went insane because of the standards that they had to meet in order to be considered good women. In this research paper I will talk about the experience of the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and Blanche DuBois from the story A Streetcar Named Desire. It will be shown within these pages how the moral and societal standards for women were far different than they were for men, and how the standards changed over the years. Furthermore it will be shown how this effected the women of those two stories.

Through history women have fought for equal rights and freedom. This tension is derived from men; society, in general; and within a woman herself. In the nineteenth century, women in literature were often portrayed as submissive to men. Literature of this period often characterized women as oppressed by society, as well as by the male influences in their lives. This era is especially interesting because it is a time in modern society when women were still treated as second-class citizens. Two interesting short stories, "Hills like White Elephants" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" focus on a woman's plight near the turn of the nineteenth century. Both authors, Hemmingway and Gilman, leave an open end to the stories and allow readers to create

Two-hundred years is a sizeable gap of time that allows plenty of room for change. American society had been rapidly changing from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, but despite this, the roles and rights of women have remained locked in place. There were many factors to consider as to why women were not allowed to flourish in their time and exceed these boundaries, and while some accepted it, there were many that opposed and faced these difficulties head on. Two female authors, one from colonial times, and one from nineteenth century America, have written about the obstacles and misogyny they’ve overcome in a male dominated literary career. Despite the two-hundred-year gap between the lives of Margaret Fuller and Anne Bradstreet, they both face issues regarding the static stereotype that women are literarily inferior and subservient handmaids to men.

Life during the 1800s for a woman was rather distressing. Society had essentially designated them the role of being a housekeeper and bearing children. They had little to no voice on how they lived their daily lives. Men decided everything for them. To clash with society 's conventional views is a challenging thing to do; however, Charlotte Perkins Gilman does an excellent job fighting that battle by writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” one of the most captivating pieces of literature from her time. By using the conventions of a narrative, such as character, setting, and point of view, she is capable of bringing the reader into a world that society

Topics of great social impact have been dealt with in many different ways and in many different mediums. Beginning with the first women’s movement in the 1850’s, the role of women in society has been constantly written about, protested, and debated. Two women writers who have had the most impact in the on-going women’s movement are Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper are two of feminist literature’s cornerstones and have become prolific parts of American literature. Themes of entrapment by social dictates, circumstance, and the desire for personal independence reside within each work and bond the two together.

In American literature, women have been portrayed differently depending on the sex and race of the author. Henry James who wrote “Daisy Miller: A Study” (1878) characterized Daisy as a tramp who breaks expatriate social customs. When a male writes about a woman, she is sometimes portrayed as a troublemaker and often up to no good. On the other hand, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), the narrator is trapped by domestic life. When a woman writes about women, they are usually victims of their society. James and Gilman each seem to display women differently because of their own sex, personal preferences, and experiences.

In the early nineteen century, women were not explicitly part of literature. they were used male pseudonym to publish their works. However, later in the century, there was a shift in women’s implication in literature. women began to be publicly recognized as writers, and they were using their writings to advocate for women’s rights and to reject stereotypes that were commonly associated with them. For example, in the early nineteen century, books and novels were mostly describing “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” as attributes of a good woman (Fortin). Writings by women were describing women that where rejecting values of the patriarchal society; women that wanted freedom and independence. The writings of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman exemplify the features of the Feminist phase of female literary tradition. Published respectively in 1892 and 1895, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin are the quintessence of feminist literature. They both used characterization, setting, ad irony to protest a misogynistic society and to request women’s rights and autonomy.