The Yellow Wallpaper: Repression
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman is sad story of the
repression that women face in the days of late 1800's as well as being
representative of the turmoils that women face today. Gilman writes "The
Yellow Wallpaper" from her own personal experiences of having to face the
overwhelming fact that this is a male dominated society and sometimes women
suffer because of it.
The narrator, being female, is suffering from a "temporary
depression". She states right from the beginning that "John is a
physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course,
but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-- perhaps that is
the one reason I
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Perhaps to save her own sanity?
Once the narrator determines that the image is in fact a woman
struggling to become free, she somehow aligns herself with the woman. In
the story she mentions that she often sees the woman creeping outside. "I
see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in
those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden.... I don't blame
her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night,
for I know John would suspect something at once." This shows the narrator
seeing herself in the woman and when she sees the woman creeping outside,
she sees herself. When she creeps outside she locks the door. She is
afraid her husband will take away the only comfort she had know since she
was subjected to this "rest cure".
She continues to pursue this obsessive project of getting the
woman out. The narrator wants the woman to be free of the paper but does
not want to let her go. The woman is her sanity; "I don't want to go
out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to
astonish him. I've got a rope up her that even Jennie did not find. If
that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!"
After peeling all the paper within her reach in hopes of getting
the woman out, she states, "I am getting angry enough to do something
desperate. To jump
1. What piece of paper did the author’s mother carry for twenty years, and why did she carry it?
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.
Not too long ago, a male-dominant society considered women as property and did not allow women to think or speak with freedom. In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonists lack of control is symbolized through elements in wallpaper, which inevitably results in her growing hysteria/paranoia.
. . There is something strange about the house-I can feel it"; she also relates how everything she does exhausts her. These symptoms, as well as the numerous referrals by the narrator to the baby, indicate post-partum depression. When speaking of the baby the narrator says, for example, "I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous."
You are not leaving by yourself. JOANIE: You’ll never make it. He’ll grab you, torture you, and kill you.
Traditionally, men have held the power in society. Women have been treated as a second class of citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Feminist criticism contends that literature either supports society’s patriarchal structure or provides social criticism in order to change this hierarchy. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts one women’s struggle against the traditional female role into which society attempts to force her and the societal reaction
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a brilliant description of the plight of the Victorian woman, and the mental agony that her and many other women were put through as "treatment" for depression when they found that they were not satisfied by the life they had been given.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist symbolizes the effect of the oppression of women in society in the Nineteenth Century. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author reveals the narrator is torn between hate and love, but emotion is difficult to determine. The effects are produced by the use of complex themes used in the story, which assisted her oppression and reflected on her self-expression.
From reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator which is Charlotte suffered more from oppression than depression. The narrator starts off the story by describing how their new summer home was, and how she felt it was a creepy home. John who is a physician tried to help cure his wife with her Illness restricts her on bed rest all day long. Charlotte tries to fight against her nervous condition while trying to be break free from her husband’s controlling ways. The narrator’s identity and lack of freedom are symbolized through the yellow wallpaper. The narrator uses the symbol of oppressive yellow wallpaper to describe her emotional feelings, and the need to escape her husband. When the narrator describes the yellow wallpaper she goes into detail
see. Through it she sees all that she could be and everything that she could have. But she says
“I don 't like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” the woman behind the pattern was an image of herself. She has been the one “stooping and creeping.” The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story, three characters are introduced, Jane (the narrator), John, and Jennie. The Yellow Wallpaper is an ironic story that takes us inside the mind and emotions of a woman suffering a slow mental breakdown. The narrator begins to think that another woman is creeping around the room behind the wallpaper, attempting to "break free", so she locks herself in the room and begins to tear down pieces of the wallpaper to rescue this trapped woman. To end the story, John unlocks the door and finds Jane almost possessed by the woman behind the wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist background gives a feminist standpoint in The Yellow Wallpaper because the narrator’s husband, John acts superior to the narrator.
Throughout history the female gender has been considered the lesser sex, where they had little to no power over anything. Eventually they got tired of their mistreatment and those who wanted it to end became known as feminist. They hold the idea that both men and women should be treated as equals. Many feminist were authors who contained the feminist literary theory within their works. The theory mainly focuses on critiquing how women must comply with gender roles and how they have been denied their rights by men. The feminist literary theory has many forms, one of them would be cultural feminism, which focuses on the stereotypical women who is only meant to look pretty and take care of minor jobs such as cooking, cleaning, and watching the children. The feminist literary appears in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which is about an unnamed female narrator who suffers from a nervous condition during the late 1800s, and is locked within her bedroom. The feminist Kate Chopin has written many works containing the feminist literary theory, such as her short story “The Story of an Hour” which revolves around Mrs. Mallard, who has lost her husband in a train accident, so she starts to shed tears of sorrow, however her tears of sorrow transform into tears of joy. One of Chopin 's novel, The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier a woman who starts to realize the truth of society. Feminist literary theory can be viewed in many different
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.
Her passion is to write and by doing so we are able to follow her on a
The woman behind this work of literature portrays the role of women in the society during that period of time. "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a well written story describing a woman who suffers from insanity and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The author uses her own experience to criticize male domination of women during the nineteenth century. Although the story was written fifty years ago, "The Yellow Wallpaper" still brings a clear message how powerless women were during that time.