Chauvinism In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Chauvinism was an omnipresent issue that women of the 19th century constantly encountered in their daily lives through the form of repressive social discipline, strict gender roles and systemic patriarchal notions (Rosenberg, 1973). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 realism piece, “The Yellow Wallpaper” clearly illustrates such issues through the characters John and his wife the narrator who embody the reputable physician and his ailing wife respectively. As readers, we become privy to the narrator’s experience with the consequences of chauvinism through the form of diary entries, allowing us an unadulterated view into her mind; first row seats to her slow descent into misery, madness, and obsession.

Within “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John embodies

As the author of the diary, she is never explicitly describes herself to us, however, the glimpse into her mind through the pages of her writing is infinitely more revealing than anything she could tell us. The reactions she has to her situation and the language she uses to describe them change over time, as she advances from equilibrium, to disequilibrium, before finally arriving at a perceived equilibrium. At first, she is open and truthful, hiding only what is deemed by society as ‘inappropriate’ – it is because of this suppression that the following occurs. She refuses to tell a “living soul” of her theory that “perhaps [John] is one reason…” she does not get well faster, and instead choses to discuss this matter with “dead paper”(Gilman, 1892). The first signs of disequilibrium occur when the narrator secretly continues to write behind her husbands back, who believes that writing will make her nervousness worse. Overtime, she becomes increasingly “unreasonably angry”(Gilman, 1892), grows severely afraid of John, and believes the wallpaper has a woman trapped within its pattern. The resolution occurs upon the perceived equilibrium - presaged by the growing obsession with the yellow wallpaper - in which the narrator seems to believe that she is the woman in the wallpaper, and now takes on the wallpaper woman’s voice, saying, “I’ve got out at last… in spite of you and Jane!”. The reader is shifted from one disconnect to another – where we previously were privy to the narrators inner most intimate thoughts, we no indication as to who she was. The inverse is now true, as we know who she was, but with no more access to her diary entries. We have lost all intimacy. This makes it obvious for the reader the theme of isolation; throughout the novel we were limited in our perspective, isolated to only