What Is Feminism In The Yellow Wallpaper

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she

During the 19th century men considered themselves to be the superior sex. Without a valid reason or explanation, men were the providers, the politicians, and the physicians. Men had the power. The power to make the rules and set the guidelines of how things were supposed to be done and women were expected to follow without question. The 19th century was also the start of the women’s activist movement, more and more women were starting to realize that they had a voice and they wanted to be heard. Women were gaining the courage to speak up against the wishes of men and set their own guidelines. To stand up and tell men that contrary to what they believe, they are not always right. Among these opinionated women was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the author of many short stories and books on gender inequality. Gilman is most known for her Short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” published in 1892, where she writes about a wife and now a new mother suffering from depression. Through her work she reveals the strength and influence men had over women, the lack of knowledge pertaining to mental health and gender roles present during the 1800s.

The yellow wallpaper is symbolized by being an imprisonment to the narrator. She asked if it could be taken down, but is told no and is stuck in the room with it. Throughout the story the narrator's opinions and feelings of the wallpaper start to change. At the beginning she describes it as unpleasant, and is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The pattern of the wallpaper is what draws the most attention to her. She tries to figure out how the pattern is organized and the meaning it represents. After staring at the paper for many hours she starts to see a ghostly figure behind the pattern, but only in certain light. The wallpaper eventually starts to resemble a desperate woman who is looking for freedom because she is trapped. The narrator realizes that her husband's treatment is not working for her and sees the wallpaper as a prison she is stuck in. The story describes it saying “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be (Gilman).” She eventually becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and realizes that she is the woman behind bars in the wallpaper who can not

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” the husband, John, is conventional for the time. During the 19th-century, men were at the top of the patriarchal order, this meant that his wife, Jane, had no say in what he did for her or to her. Being that John thought nothing was wrong with Jane and he was a well-known physician, he took her to a house for the summer so that she may get some rest.Jane due to circumstances had no say in the matter. John at times was controlling, but at the same time, he loved his wife. Most of his actions were typical of men in this time period and really say a lot about how men treated their wives back then and how they always imagined that they were the divine leaders of the household. Men in this

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and illustrates many patriarchal and feminist views. We see the very strict gender roles that the characters seem to be confined in. John is confined to the idea that males are to be the head of the household, decisive and rational thinkers. The narrator, on the other hand, is tied to her gender role of being submissive to her husband and not questioning his judgement. She constantly tries to break these rules by suggestion ideas to her husband, but he dismisses her without thought. When the narrator first notices the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom and asks if they can replace it John simply tells her that she was just letting the wallpaper get the best of her and if the wallpaper

One’s freedom is a privilege that is highly regarded, but in most cases one takes it for granted. Throughout history, men have had this right handed to them, while in contrast, women either had to fight and risk all they had or accept their meek rank in society due to their sex. This disadvantage drives women to lengths they normally would not succumb to feel free of the shortcomings that history has given them. In Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the dominance of a patriarchal society is exposed. The verisimilitude of Gilman’s imagery of the setting lengthily describes the isolation and confinement of the narrator and their effects on her. The house she is staying in is her own prison, and is a symbol of her

In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman who is mentally ill but cannot heal because of the little belief that her husband has. This story is taken place during the time when women were depressed. “Women were treated as second rated people in society during this time period”. Feminist criticism can analyze this story by both a female and male perspectives and through many symbols through the Yellow Wallpaper. between both the men and the women there is no difference when it came to mentality.

The narrator is fully aware that she has been experiencing difficulties because of her mental stability and expresses this concern right away to her husband. She also reveals that even as a child, she was already acting different compared to her peers, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store,” (Gilman). This indicates that even the narrator’s parents were unaware of the symptoms or refused to address her unusual behavior until it reached to the point that their married daughter’s mental condition worsened. Besides this, the characters in The Yellow Wallpaper seem to believe that writing is an activity that worsens her ‘nervous depression’, when it fact, the narrator uses writing to relieve her anxieties and stresses. Her husband is an all-knowing type of character as he uses his doctor status to diagnose his wife’s condition as a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency”.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” originally published in 1892, the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes of the struggles that women faced during that period in time. Women typically had the role of a housewife and mother during the 1800s, and were not viewed or recognized as equal to men. While this was the typical way of how men kept control of and treated women during the time of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, inside Jane’s head, she was an emotional and physical prisoner of her husband John. John would not allow Jane write down thoughts or ideas, nor would he allow her to leave the bedroom because she was “sick”. In John’s eyes, he would lose control of his wife if he allowed her to get better to which ironically, he lost control, as she escaped her mental prison.

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, like many stories, has an underlying message that seems to be hidden between the lines. If you sit down and read this story once, you might see a bit of male domination of John over the narrator, but if you read it a second time and think deeper you see the true feminist theme. Gillman truly showed her feminist ways throughout this story, although it’s a short story and contains a lot of powerful messages in it. The first point is that Gillman uses metaphors to show her feminism, the second is that she uses small things, like the narrators word choice, to show how women are over looked and the last point is that the women are so concerned with what the opinions of men and what they think.

frees the woman behind the wallpaper. This is seen when she exclaimed to her husband that “I’ve got out at last… And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back (237). She has finally transitioned to her ideal form, the woman, she has created from and in spite of madness. This new identity as a feminist allows her to stand up to her husband and overcome her confinement.

The yellow wallpaper has a lot of Feminist .The yellow wallpaper was male-run establishment and the patriarchal (Controlled by man) structure in the nineteenth century households. Prior to the twentieth century men had assigned and defined roles for women. Most of the woman that had suffered were the middle class. Men had the so called power to overrule the woman. In the poem the yellow wallpaper it’s about this woman that is driven to madness as a result of a Victorian ‘rest-cure’. The rest cure involves the isolation of family and friends and that’s what she had.

     In the late nineteenth century, after the American social and economic shift commonly referred to as the "Industrial Revolution" had changed the very fabric of American society, increased attention was paid to the psychological disorders that apparently had steamed up out of the new smokestacks and skyscrapers in urban populations (Bauer, 131).  These disorders were presumed to have been born out of the exhaustion and "wear and tear" of industrial society (Bauer, 131-132).  An obvious effect of these new disorders was a slew of physicians and psychiatrists advocating one sort of cure or another, although the "rest cure" popularized by the physician S. Weir Mitchell was the most

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.

One feminist theory is that whenever woman hold power in society they are treated as the “other”. Women have always been seen as domestic or the care takers of the family; women stay home with the kids, tend to dinner and the cleaning. That being said whenever a woman, like Jane, tries to step out of the nurturing role, men tend to feel intimidated and was unsure how to react to such a thing happening (like when John and Jane’s brother diagnose her to be mentally ill all because she desires to write). In the time of the story, Jane is seen as “mentally ill” because she desires to read and write while her husband who happens to be a physician “of high standing” says she tends to have “slightly hysterical tendency” (Page 1, paragraph 5). In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper to symbolize Jane, who represents the way women use to be treated as the “lesser” in society.