Repressed Feminism And Gender Roles

The narrator falls into a state of deep depression following the birth of her baby, which is currently known now as postpartum depression. During the 1800’s they called it “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” a diagnosis common to women during that era. There was little or no knowledge for the treatment of postpartum depression. The doctors used “rest cure” as a form of treatment, the patient is prohibited from doing any kind of work. All they need is to rest, exercise, eat well and get enough air then they will recover. No external stimulation which lead to the deterioration of the narrator’s mental health in the story. She is ordered by her husband and brother, who are respected physicians to rest. She is isolated from everyone except her husband John and her sister in law Jennie the house keeper. Locked in a room with yellow wall paper, windows facing all direction, all the

As a woman, the narrator must be protected and controlled and kept away from harm. This seemed to be the natural mindset in the 19th century, that women need to have guidance in what they do, what decisions they make, and what they say. John calls her a “little goose”(95) and his “little girl”(236), referring her to a child, someone who needs special attention and control. His need for control over her is proven when she admits that her husband is “careful and loving and hardly lets me stir without special direction”(49). John has mentally restrained the speaker’s mind, she is forced to hide her anxieties, fears and be submissive, to preserve the happiness of their marriage. When the narrator attempts to speak up, she is bogged down and made guilty of her actions. Her husband makes her feel guilty for asking, he says, “‘I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind!’”(225-226). By making her feel guilty for her illness, John has trapped her mentally from speaking up about it, convincing her that she must be more careful about her actions. Men often impose the hardships placed upon women during this era. They are often the people reassuring them of their “womanly” duties, and guiding them

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, already suffering with Post-Partum Depression, is further constrained when her husband John prescribes her resting treatment for her illness. John clarifies that she must lie in bed in the same, enclosed room, refrain from using her imagination and especially abstain from writing. This, in turn, forces the narrator deeper into her

Throughout the beginning of the story, the wife continually references the things “John says” (844-5). That indicates to me that she is timid and perhaps frightened of him. “John says this,” and “John says that,” shows me that our narrator doesn’t feel permitted to have a thought that is her own. The story’s unilateral male, as well as unilateral female conversations are friendly and comfortable. However, male to female conversation in the writing is dominant, aggressive, assertive and sometimes dangerous. Female to male exchanges appear delicate, soft and understanding, always agreeing with the male perspective. I would consider women in this time period to be viewed as a pet or toy to the male, dominant figure in her life. The use of the words in this short is very important, and gives you the information to interpret the story. For instance, on page 845 it says, “It was a nursery first, then a playroom and gymnasium. I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children.” This discloses that our woman has post-partum depression. At the very least, she feels as if she is trapped or in an asylum within her own home. Perhaps this feeling of entrapment lends itself to driving her mad. It is no surprise that the woman feels trapped behind the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. Her days and nights are filled with constant repetition of the same nothingness. She is left with little to

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.

In this psychological tale we are introduced to a woman facing a mental illness in the late 1800’s writing secretly about essentially being belittled about her health by her husband, John, a doctor, who subjects her to bed rest and isolation to the real world to recover. Her words: “...John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (page 2 of The Yellow Wall-Paper) struck with me. I understand the feeling of suddenly feeling useless, unproductive and sort of trapped in your own mind. As she loses touch with life outside of the house, she begins to obsess with the women she sees behind the yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. First, I believed the wallpaper to be a metaphor of her depression, “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design [of the wallpaper].” (page 4 of The

The doctor’s anecdote of his wife taking phosphates, tonics, journeys and air along with exercise was above reproach. If women had more of a voice, would approaches to treatment for mental illness have been more effective? Feeling powerless, the wife was relieved of her duties and cared for by her husband, the housekeeping was done by Jennie, her sister-in-law, and Mary cared for the baby.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” tells of the journey into insanity (brought on by postpartum depression?) of a physician’s wife. Persuaded by her husband that there is nothing wrong with her, only temporary nervous depression, a diagnosis that is confirmed by her brother( Gilman, 647). What is telling is that she suspects perhaps her husband John is the reason she does not get well faster. She and/or we are led to believe that they have rented a colonial mansion for the summer for her to get well. She is however isolated in a home three miles from the village and on an island. (Gilman, 648). She wants to stay in the downstairs room with roses and pretty things, but her husband insists on the room at the top of the house ostensibly because it has room for two beds. But the room’s description of barred windows and walls with rings and things in them (Gilman, 648) could leads the reader one to conclude that this is his own private asylum, and not “a nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium” (Gilman, 648) as the woman believes. It is this room, and more precisely the wallpaper in the room

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story that surrounds many different topics. The narrator is living in a time period where women were looked down upon and mental illnesses were misunderstood. The narrator of the story suffers from post-partum depression and is recording her journey in a journal. Her husband, the typical man at the time, put her on “the rest cure,” as he believed that mental illnesses should be treated like physical illnesses. He brings her to a house far away from other people and makes her stay in the nursery. The nursery had shabby yellow wallpaper which sickened her, but intrigued her at the same time. The rest cure was basically confinement, both physically and mentally. She was deprived of

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

John demonstrates the power of male to stop his wife’s complaints. John holds resolutely to the conventional lines of the marriage plot and produces authority out of a distanced and ironic critique of women diseases. Janice Peritz stated in her journal that, ‘’Author, Williams Howell, had nothing to say about the provocative feminism of Gilman’s text after he added her short story to his collection which caused Gilman’s story to be completely ignored’’. Gilman makes a strong statement about males in society during her time period. The men are portrayed to really see women as children more than as individuals. The dominance of men is undeniable, ‘’ He does not believe I’m sick’’. The narrator has lost control to decide is she’s sick or not, which is one of the most basic things a person can determine. The narrator stated, “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, what is one to do?” Gilman portrays that women ‘‘invented” their emotional illnesses in order to attract attention and sympathy of other relatives. It is possible to say that male physicians prefer to find any excuse not to treat psychological disorders seeing them unimportant and even “imaginary”. The typical male makes his wife a conformist by enforcing his

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story set in a 19th century colonial mansion, in which the narrator and her husband stay for the summer. The narrator, who is unnamed, is undergoing a rest cure for some kind of mental illness after giving birth. This mental illness is now known as postpartum depression. Rest cure involves doing absolutely nothing and this triggered the further deterioration of the narrator’s mental health. Her husband, John, monitors her condition while they stay in the mansion. She is confined in a room— supposedly a nursery room— with barred windows and scratches on the floor. The most noticeable feature of the room by the narrator is the yellow wallpaper. Each day, her description of the yellow wallpaper becomes more disturbing; from being just plain wallpaper to being a prison cell for trapped women, shaking the bars, wanting to be free from it. Instead of getting well from the rest cure, the narrator’s mental state worsened as what is depicted in her journal entries. She eventually goes mad and her husband fainted from the sight of her condition.

She has been told she may do no work of any kind. She must not read, write, sew, or tire herself with daily chores. Over her objections her husband has insisted she take her ease in the top-floor nursery of the house, a large room with barred windows. In her boredom she has taken to studying the wallpaper in the nursery. It is a ghastly yellow color with an intriguing and intricate pattern. In the paper she discovers the ghosts that are haunting her desolation.

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.

The combination of the protagonist’s insanity and the setting of the nursery with yellow wallpaper identify a theme of imprisonment of females in a domestic world. The anonymous wife is taken by her husband to a country mansion to recover from a state of hysteria. The narrator then takes it upon herself to actively study and decode the wallpaper, and through her downward spiral into insanity she untangles its confused pattern to reveal a woman trapped in the depths of the chaotic outlines. As time passes the narrator begins to relate to this encaged woman and believes that she too is trapped within the wallpaper. During the last few nights the narrator tears down the wallpaper in an attempt to escape from her cage. The use of the yellow wallpaper as a symbolic gesture to the entrapment of women shows how setting can directly relate to the theme of a short story.