Examining “The Yellow Wallpaper” through a Marxist lens can be especially challenging. At first blush, this short story appears to be told from a purely feministic point of view, however, the text incorporates themes of power and oppression. Karl Marx was a sociologist who is famous for his work on the different classes and the power of money. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story does not make any obvious references to race or the working class, she does write about the oppression she faced from the men in her own life. Just like Karl Marx wrote about the oppression the working class felt from the wealthier class, so Gilman felt inferior to the men in her life and expressed that emotion through her writing. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the main character is a woman who is most likely suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband, who is also a doctor, confines her to her room as he believes that he knows what is best for her. Just like the Marxist view, she is being oppressed by a dominant social class. This story was set in the nineteenth century, so the male gender was the dominant social class at the time. The Marxist view is concerned with relationships and power, just like “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the traditional sense, Karl Marx was mainly concerned about the relationship of power …show more content…
The woman in the story remains discontent and observant of her husband’s actions. The narrator, Gilman, pays extra attention to detail in her writing which made her an unusual companion to her husband. Gilman’s writing expresses how somber and perceptive the lower classes are of the dominant class. Like the husband and doctor in the story, the upper class controlled most of the money, power, and prestige. In this story, the doctor forms the bourgeoisie capitalist class while his wife represents the proletarian worker (Walsh