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The yellow wallpaper What is the role of women in the text
Women's roles in the yellow wallpaper
The yellow wallpaper What is the role of women in the text
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The color yellow, when used negatively, represents sickness or weakness. in "the yellow wallpaper", Charlotte Perkins Stetson uses the wallpaper to represent how the main character is perceived by her husband, but also to help her understand herself. To her husband it is just wallpaper, but to her it becomes the personification of her life. The appearance she is forced to perceive versus the reality of her mind is expressed in the setting, the symbols use, and the irony of her situation.
She slowly starts to fear her Husband, she notes how there is an odd smell that accumulates in her room, and she always references the yellow wallpaper, in that it changes in certain ways. She began to comment on how some parts of the wallpaper was torn, then she progressed to how there were bouts of fungus growing on the walls until she begins to speak of how the pattern on the wallpaper shakes because of the “woman behind it.” “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over,” this is when her sanity is clearly broken. She moves on from talking about her husband, the daylight, and the room itself to only speaking of the women and how she moves around. This clear descent into madness is a byproduct of how she is often dismissed by her husband and brother concerning her
She begins to find the wallpaper therapeutic and feels as if it might be helping her illness. Jane later exclaims, “…I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself” (317)! She continues to write that the pattern in the wallpaper “…becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind is as plain as can be… I am quite sure it is a woman” (316). Although she believes the wallpaper is helping her win her mental battle, keeping what she sees in the wallpaper to herself is causing her condition to spiral out of control.
When I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the four main things that stood out to me were the narrator's mental state, the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper, the role of women in society during that time, and the isolation experienced by the narrator. Firstly, the narrator's mental state is a significant theme throughout the story. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper, it becomes clear that she is suffering from some form of mental illness. This is particularly striking because it highlights the lack of understanding and treatment of mental illness during the late 1800s.
----------------The yellow wallpaper is a short story which shows the regressive and condescending treatment of “hysterical” women. The author writes about the common “rest cure” which women had to endure to “cure” their mental problems. The book came out in 1892 and created an outrage across the country by the more dominant sex in the era – the male sex. One physician in Boston obviously felt offended as he responded with; “Such a story ought not to be written… it is enough to drive anyone mad to read.”. Because of comments like this, Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not find success until the middle of the 20th century.
This causes her illness to get progressively worse, and starts the writing of her secret journal in which she writes about the house until she is interrupted by John. The narrator then sneaks the journal again and writes that her family had just visited and left her tired. After this, her writing becomes obsessive with the yellow wallpaper and she writes that she sees a sub-pattern within the wallpaper. She says this pattern is a woman stooping down and creeping around the room. The narrator then goes to the point of ripping wallpaper off the wall to release the woman and when her husband comes in through the locked door, he sees her condition and faints so the narrator has to “creep over him every time”
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman often discussed for its biographical critic on the way women, but especially those suffering from mental illnesses profiled by 19th century physicians as "women's diseases", have been treated in society at the end of the 19th century (Teichler 1984: 61, Oakley 1997: 29). In order to cure the female main character of her hysterical tendencies--a status she was diagnosed with after the birth of her son--she has been confined to the former nursery in the family's house, and undergoes a treatment in which she is forced to avoid all forms of stimuli, excitement, or activity (Gilman 1997: 1-15.). One of the main objects she interacts with during her isolation period, besides the nailed down bed and her hidden journal, is the yellow wallpaper with which the former nursery is papered (Gilman 1997: 1-15.).
The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of oppression and tragedy, revolving around the protagonists’ mental state, which is worsened by her husband’s domination of every aspect of her life. In the 1800’s, life was very different for women than it is today. Women were always controlled by a male relative in life, be it their father or brothers, then their husbands, and had no property of their own. When a woman was married, she and her husband became one entity, where her husband controlled all of her daily life.
Trapped within her own mind, oppressed by a faithful spouse, a victim of malpractice, and stripped of the rights to be a dutiful wife as well as a loving mother, Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a vivid fictional narrative that symbolizes the entrapment and suffering that many women of the nineteenth century lived through. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, creates a narrator who suffers from a mental illness, in a time where clinical psychology, and depression had yet not been explored, nor studied. The narrator’s husband, John, handles her illness terribly. In the narrative “The Yellow Wallpaper” John, as a medical practitioner, as well as a husband, is negligent, controlling, and mentally abuses the narrator.
Though something to her feels off about this house. As they explore the house they, discover a nursery with yellow wallpaper inside. The woman becomes obsessed with this wallpaper, trying to decipher each and every pattern, logging all of it into her diary which she keeps away from her
The historical implications of patriarchal ideas regarding gender led Charlotte Perkins Gilman to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”. During the 1900s, women were excluded from the public sphere and remained subjected to the domestic and private spheres. Women were considered as second-class citizens with virtually no individual rights. It was every woman’s responsibility to fulfill her domestic duties of becoming a mother, and raising her children with a high sense of morality and nationalistic, as well as patriotic values (cite). Because women’s lives revolved only around the domestic sphere many suffered mental issues, or so it was believed.
Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper,” tells the story of a well-off, married woman experiencing a “nervous depression” (193) that is likely postpartum depression. To treat her illness her husband, a physician, whisks her away to the countryside where she is prescribed to rest and do absolutely no stimulating work or activity, a parallel to Gilman’s own experience of rest cure (Berke et al. 193). While the unnamed narrator who tells the story in first person, does not agree with this form of treatment, she resigns to following the prescription or at least pretending to follow the order. The narrator is confined to what is supposedly a former nursery to “rest” and “get air” (Gilman 194). Here, the narrator has an immediate reaction to the horrible yellow wallpaper (Gilman 195).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the tale of a distraught woman who, when searching for the support of her husband, is met with a patronizing attitude. Throughout the story, more is learned about the metaphor behind the yellow wallpaper and the narrator's internal battle to reach freedom. From a feminist perspective, Gilman’s story details the woman’s struggles and hints at the inequality between men and women as being the underlying cause. John, the narrator's husband, is introduced as a critical man who openly expresses how foolish he finds his wife’s illness to be. As a physician, he downplays the severity of her situation, by describing her ailment as merely “temporary nervous depression” and it is revealed
John frequently mocks her when she "fancies." To control her conduct, John whisks her away to a country estate where she is confined to a room with barred windows, peeling yellow wallpaper, and a bedstead fastened to the floor, giving the room an impression of a penitentiary. Owing to the narrator's limited capacity for mental stimulation and social interaction, she’s been driven to use her imagination through the wallpaper, the one part of her life she has control over. As she seeks out human interaction, she begins to find heads behind imperceptible bars on the wallpaper. The narrator's psychosis worsens as she focuses her desire to escape the constraints in her life onto a figure 2 Pho hidden beneath the strangling pattern—a figure of a woman, "stooping down and crawling around," as she herself creeps about her restricted world.
At the beginning of the short story Jane absolutely hates the wallpaper in her bedroom, but at the end Jane claims that she is “getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper.” (page ) At the beginning of the story Jane is aggravated at John and after John’s treatment she describes him as “so wise” (page ) and “loving [her] so.” (page ) Throughout the “Yellow Wallpaper” John consistently makes Jane’s condition worse and worse until she finally has a mental breakdown.
