Analysis Of The Yellow Wall Paper

The social code of the Victorian era places women in a role of obedience. They are expected to fulfill duties such as a mother, keeper of a house, and to be a quiet and “behaved” spouse. The narrator in this story is an obedient spouse, who has become a new mother that experiences postpartum depression. The change in her role sparks a change in her demeanor, causing a “nervous condition”, in which her husband dictates her treatment. John’s treatment of his wife represents the powerless-ness and repression of women during the late nineteenth-century.” (Wilson). John’s authority over her treatment, mimics that of patient to doctor relationship, and further reminds her of her secondary status during the era.

She has been trained to trust in her husband blindly and sees no other way. He calls her “little girl” (352) and “little goose” (349) and states “She will be as sick as she pleases!” (352) whenever she tries to express her issues. Instead of fighting for what she thinks will make her better she accepts it and keeps pushing her feelings aside, while he treats her like a child. We get an instant feel for her problem in the first page when she says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that” (pg 346). A woman shouldn’t expect her husband to laugh at her concerns. Even after briefly writing about her condition she remembers her husband telling her the very worst thing she can do is think about it and follows his instructions. This is when she begins to focus on the house instead of her problems and the obsession with the wallpaper starts. She has nothing else to think about alone in the home; they don’t even allow her to write, which she has to do in secret.

John’s views as a doctor forbid any type of activity, because he feels it will only worsen her fragile condition. She says, “So I take phosphates or phosphites- whichever it is- and tonics, and air and exercise, and journeys, and am absolutely for bidden to ‘work’ until I am well again” (Gilman 221). But the narrator believes she would feel better if she could write because she does not believe it to be “work”. “Personally I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 221). The narrator believes that writing would help her get better more than the rest cure. John addresses his wife as “‘little girl,’ and chooses the nursery rather than one of the adult bedrooms for his wife” (Griffin 11). The narrator has absolute no control over her own care, “she disagrees with her husband’s orders forbidding her to work, yet her opinion goes unrecognized.” (Griffin 11). He treats her like a weak, fragile child, which for the most part is what women were described as in that time period.

Also, we can relate the woman in the wallpaper to the narrator because she is free to do what she wants because John is not there, but during the night she is locked up in her room much like the woman in the wallpaper. These circumstances in which the narrator was put under during the late 1800's would not have been an oddity, and therefore I believe many women just as the narrator did would have had problems go undiagnosed.

Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.

Like the narrator, women of that time were directed to suppress their creativity as it threatened the dominating male's sense of control. By having the narrator be forced to write in secret, "There comes John, and I must put this away -- he hates to have me write a word," Gilman was able to show that even the simplest things, like wanting to write were forbidden, lest the male approved (392). Prohibited from working and not being able to contribute to the household as a proper wife, the narrator begins to feel helpless: "So I… am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas" (390). The narrator’s husband and brother both exert their own will over hers, forcing her to do what they think is the appropriate behavior for a sick woman. She has been given a "schedule[d] prescription for each hour in the day; [John] takes all care from me" (391). The way that she is required to act involves practically no exertion of her own free-will. Instead, she is expected to obediently accept the fact that her own ideas are mere fancy, and only the opinions of the men in her life can be trusted. The fact that she is not allowed to think for herself is narrowing the extent of her authority in her life and of her autonomy.

In her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expresses exasperation towards the separate male and female roles expected of her society, and the evident repressed rights of a woman versus the active duties of a man. The story depicts the methods taken to cure a woman of her psychological state during Gilman’s time, and delineates the dominant cure of the time period, “the resting cure,” which encouraged the restraint of the imagination ("The Yellow Wallpaper: Looking Beyond the Boundaries") Gilman uses the unnamed narrator to represent the average repressed woman of her time and how her needs were neglected in an attempt to mark a fixed distinction between the standards and expectations of men and women. John, the narrator’s husband, take the designated and patriarchal role of a man who believes he knows everything there is to know about the human mind. His belief of his superior knowledge pushes him to condescend, overshadow, and misunderstand his wife. As a result, his wife loses control of her life and escapes into her own fantasy world, where she is able dominate her imagination, free her mind, and fall into insanity. Gilman describes her era’s approach toward female psychology in order to criticize the patriarchal society she lived in as well as to reveal its effects on the women of her time.

John is an antagonist of the story. He feels he is doing his wife good; by locking her away in this mansion. However, the reader soon realizes, this treatment is only worsening her mental state. He is never home with her; he always has patients to see in town, leaving her locked in this house; alone with her thoughts. He ensures that she gets rest and fresh air to get well. To him, it may seem as though he is doing his wife good; by locking her away in this mansion. However, this seclusion she experiences causes serious damage to her mental state. Her husband has control over her that women

The author states, “John hates me to write a word”(474). It seems that writing is a form of escape to her, but as close as she is to do it, her husband keeps an eye on her which prevents her to keep writing and give up on it. Also Perkins states, “I did write for a while in spite of the; but it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” (474). Writing allowed her to make sense, in her mind at least, of the confusing world she was living in. John did not like her writing because to him it was a threat that can make her more sick and he was only trying to help her be better. He has to control her, and as a woman her thoughts were not important. Writing gave the woman a small sense of control or power. It allowed her to express herself and her thoughts, which John was very uncomfortable with. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (475). With this, the reader can conclude the obstacles women went through with gender inequality. John thought that he was providing for her, keeping her safe, giving her everything she wanted, but he did the opposite. He kept her locked at home, with supervision around all the time, which brought the yellow wallpaper as a major symbol for

The narrator’s varying stately yet fervent tone illustrates her obligatory feelings as well as her true emotions regarding her husband and lifestyle through her descriptions of the “nursery” where she is confined (Gilman, 648). John, since he is both her husband and doctor, “hardly lets [her] stir without special direction,” characteristic of patriarchs of the family; he also “laughs at [her], of course, but one one expects that in marriage.” (Gilman, 648 and 647). Since the narrator feels

The overall goals of womanhood included remaining passive and modest in all situations. During Gilman’s lifetime, women’s rights activists began to act out against The Cult of Domesticity, but society simply shunned them.

The woman “jane” believes she has a condition but her husband who is a physician does not take her illness seriously. In page 648 paragraph 1 the narrator states, “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?” The narrators husband is talking bad about his wide to her own friends and refusing to take her serious and at the end as she repeats “what is one to do” clearly stating that she can not do anything about her husband badmouthing about her and making allowing her to understate herself as a woman. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (pg 647). The narrator as a woman are so used to people looking down at her and throughout the story she does not feel like herself due to her husband always shutting and controlling her make her insane that she cannot be in control of her body. Page 648 paragraph 5, “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad”, as the narrator talk about her condition and herself, she then recalls her husband’s instructions, the narrator has internalized her husband’s command to the point that she virtually aurally perceives his voice in her head, telling her what to think and do. The narrator is not even a person at this point, her brain is now programmed to follow direction, to think, to feel, what her husband has recommend, she has no self-conscience anymore and for that reason she feels

Charlotte Perkins Gilman utilizes her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper to demonstrate the treatment towards women and the mentally ill in the late nineteenth-century. She wrote this short story as a way of sharing her knowledge with other women of the faults in the patriarchal society as well as, to show men the faults in their ways. Likewise, The Yellow Wallpaper demonstrates the effect that women being ostracized from society has on the mental health of these individuals. Gilman criticizes nineteenth-century society for the oppression of women, patriarchy, their treatment of mental illness, and the way people were forced to stay in unhealthy marriages; similarly, Gilman also criticizes the narrator for not standing up for herself,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” serves as a perfect example of how women are treated in the 19th century. The distracting details both surrounding and filling the new house that the main character and her husband move into haunt her. Throughout the story, the main character, as she observes the house while in isolation, notices the true meaning in life, specifically for women. Gilman’s piece unveils the unfortunate requirements that women must meet in order to become accepted into society. The imagery and description of the house mentioned in “The Yellow Wall-paper” holds a much more symbolized sense reassuring the main character about women’s roles in life, according to humanity.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a famous social worker and a leading author of women’s issues. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's relating to views of women 's rights and her demands for economic and social reform of gender inequities are very famous for the foundations of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In critics Gilman ignored by people of color in the United States and attitudes towards non-northern European immigrants (Ceplair, non-fiction, 7). “Gilman developed controversial conception of womanhood”, by Deborah M. De Simone in “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the feminization of education”. Gilman’s relation to reading deserves more attention than it has received (“The reading habit and The yellow wallpaper”). Her work about Women and Economics was considered her highest achievement by critics.