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Essay On Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Throughout the Victorian period, gender roles for men and women were strongly specified. Men were the ones that always went to work and provided for the family, whereas the wife was to stay home all day to take care of the domestic duties. Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” points out the gender role in the time that the story was written and how women were underestimated, seen as fragile things, and always followed their husbands word to be considered as acceptable for the society. The story talks about a woman suffering from postpartum depression, that her condition is made worse because her husband is not aware that the condition is a medical one. Throughout the story Gilman shows that John the physician of his own wife tried to help the wife with her condition, but at the same time he fails to notice how critical her condition is and denies her the …show more content…

The narrator says that: “It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder -- I begin to think -- I wish John would take me away from here”. The woman starts to imagine that there is a living woman trapped inside the wallpaper that is trying to tell her something, but this scares her and she wishes and silently begs for John’s help. The narrator continues to state that: “At night in any kind of light,.... it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be”. The obsession of the wallpaper drives the woman crazy, she stays up at night because in the night light she can see the trapped woman and can figure out her secret. How was she trapped in there and how she can free her? During the day the woman is able to catch some sleep because the woman in the wallpaper stays still and make no sudden

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When the narrator saw the woman captured by the wallpaper, she begins to want her freedom even more. She starts to realize that she too, is a prisoner. The more the thinks about it, the more insane she becomes. During the day, the narrator sees the woman walking around, which shows her that she can be free during the day at times, but is certainly trapped in the wallpaper at night. The author wrote, âI think that woman gets out in the day time!

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Everything that the wallpaper represents take the story deeper and allow the reader to actually understand the woman’s situation. While reading the story, the reader learns that this story is told through a diary the woman used to vent. After being left alone in that awful room, the woman is very bored and lonely, so she decides to write in it. At the beginning of the story, the woman is prescribed a “cure” for her “problems.”

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Due to the fact that she believes she is the woman trapped in the pattern, she also now feels as though that she is able to escape and never return to her controlling husband. As she identifies with the woman trapped in the wallpaper, “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” (Stetson 653), it becomes obvious to readers that she may not be aware of her restrictions in her conscious mind, but her subconscious mind is. This causes the belief that John wants to help her and do what’s best for her, however -- that’s not the case. However, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is narrated by a mentally unstable person, which makes it especially hard to dissect the story because what she is seeing and what she thinks she is seeing, along with the mentions of Jennie and John, could be perceived differently by readers than what it was supposed to come across

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She starts to see hallucinations as movement and the form of a woman appears in the wallpaper. “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 212). The narrator believes she sees a woman trapped behind all the designs in the wallpaper and she wants nothing more than to get her

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Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period.

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However, we later see a shift in her feelings towards the wallpaper as she states that she is growing “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” and comes to a realization that it may be “because of the wallpaper” (Par 94) As her opinions on the wallpaper begin to change, the progression of her mental instability becomes increasing visible. She begins to build a relationship with the wallpaper and claims that “There are things in that paper that nobody knows about” (Par 22) her. As this relationship with the wallpaper builds, her sanity begins to slip, and the hallucinations begin in a somewhat minor manor. In her first mention of “the woman” she says that the pattern on the

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When she is up in the room she feels trapped and lonely like she has nobody, and people need other people. She states, “John is kept in town very often by serious cases” (Gilman). Her husband is constantly working so he is away all the time. Being trapped in a room all day leads her to be bored, so she follows the pattern on the wallpaper. For example, she says “I lie here on this great immovable bed-it is nailed down, I believe- and follow that pattern about by the hour” (Gilman).

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However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high

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The narrator convinces herself that there is a woman trapped in the paper who is trying to get out (Perkins 385). She also claims that the woman behind the paper shakes it in hopes to escape (Perkins 388). The narrator becomes obsessed with the ghostly woman, who is in the paper, and convinces herself that she too was once trapped in the paper and escaped. The narrator is determined to catch the creeping woman. She believes that there are others who are trapped in the wallpaper by night and are free during the day.

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