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Feminism In Charlotte Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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In Charlotte Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses on an unnamed female protagonist that suffers from “temporary nervous depression” that her husband, who is her primary doctor, treats her illness with the resting cure. Which does not allow her to do any activities that could overwork her or her mind leading her to keep a secret journal about her true feelings and motives? Gilman skillfully uses of tone, style, theme, and symbol conveyed a feminist ideal, presenting a first-wave feminism masterpiece. The understanding of the tone of a story gives readers a particular message of what the author feels about the subject. The tone of a story can be closely linked to the style of the story, Gilman has the narrator 's tone as passive, disturbed, paranoid, and intimate. An example of this tone in the story is, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.”(Paragraph 86) this quote conveys the passive attitude that the narrator has. With having the narrator torn between sanity they cling on and sickness/insanity; masculine and feminine roles; and the freedom of nature and the prison of the domestic bedroom that …show more content…

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the theme could be the questioning of the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially the subordination of women in marriage as the society then already held women in such tight social constructs. The narrator bound in this role of submissive is due to her husband and is her doctor gives him more power over to decide for her, having superior wisdom and maturity that leads him to misjudge, and even patronize, dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. Even if he loves towards her this power ultimately leads her to

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Despite the ideology of her time, Gilman never resisted expressing her thoughts and feelings through her writing. By the early twentieth century, she had become an extremely influential women’s rights advocate, and author. Contrary to her doctor’s orders, she decided to reflect on her horrible experiences in her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (U.S. National Library of Medicine). At first, Gilman tried to have her story published in The Atlantic Monthly, but the editor declined because the story made him “miserable” (Straub 1). After being rejected, The New England Magazine agreed to publish Gilman’s story.

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650 Words | 3 Pages

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses many literary techniques to allow the reader to understand the universal truth that a woman’s class is seen as lower than that of a man’s, due to their sex. We see this truth throughout the literary work, when the main character who is a woman, is put in confinement and later becomesdistraught and mentally unstablebecause her husband and brother who are both Physicians diagnoses her as “nervously depressed”. Two techniques author Gilman uses is tone and diction to illustrate how the narrator, among most women in that time period is treated as below men in class, with little say in their own mental or physical issues. Gilman utilizes tone to illustrate the universal truth of gender being in hand with class status, effectively. In the literary work,the narrator’s tone shifts from hopeless in the beginning, to determine in the end.

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1112 Words | 5 Pages

In Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she tells a horrific ghost story about symptoms of the rest cure. The “rest cure” was a treatment developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who restricted women of intellectual stimuli and condemned them to a domestic life to help their postpartum recovery. After being a victim of this treatment, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Careful attention to the use of Gilman’s symbols in her short story allows the reader to analyze some of the themes concerning feminism and societal misogyny. Foreshadowing throughout, Gilman uses the house, the writing, and the wallpaper as symbols to show how man’s use of the “rest cure” limit women in society and offers that the solution to this issue is to persistently tear away at man’s injustice.

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1452 Words | 6 Pages

To begin with, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also went through postpartum depression. This story, is about a woman who has gone insane by post-partum depression and a dangerous treatment. On the other hand, an analysis of the mother’s character discloses that this story is basically about

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1212 Words | 5 Pages

The Narrator from The Yellow Wallpaper tries to do the best she can to please her husband and fulfil her role to be the perfect wife, but she isn’t able to balance out her husband’s needs. Towards the end she starts to forget the desire she once had to become the perfect wife and mother and starts to think of ways she can release the imprisoned woman that is trapped from behind the yellow wallpaper. I can see the connection that the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper can be her trying to get out of the position she’s in, sometimes the color yellow signifies being sick or very much ill. With the narrator tearing the paper apart wanting the sickness

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871 Words | 4 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story written in 1892. The story is centered around a woman who faces societal expectations, and how men controlled women’s decisions simply because men were superior at the time. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates how the lack of self-determination can have a negative impact on mental health by showing how men controlled women’s decisions through the use of narration and imagery. Initially, the protagonist is portrayed as a woman who suffers from postpartum depression or a “nervous condition.”

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1067 Words | 5 Pages

As we look at marriages in today’s day and age, it is difficult for a man to be more dominant over his wife. Women are allowed to work in any profession they choose, and do not need to rely on a man for money. However, centuries ago in the progressive era, men were superior and dominant over their wife. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel “The Yellow Wallpaper” portrays this type of image where a woman is controlled and trapped in her marriage by her husband John. In this era, they considered articles exposing issues like this as muckraking.

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1480 Words | 6 Pages

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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1414 Words | 6 Pages

The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.”

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899 Words | 4 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper is a semi-autobiographical short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Before proceeding directly to the analysis of this short story, it is important to understand the writer herself. Gilman used her personal struggle with postpartum depression, to create a powerful fictional story, which has wide subtext for women. When the narrator admits that there is more than one captured crawling woman Gilman points out that the meaning of her story goes beyond the isolated, individual situation. The main goal of writing this story is to rescue the women from further suffering under “rest cure” and to condemn the oppression of women, which was usual for the twentieth century.

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1585 Words | 7 Pages

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 at the height of the Victorian era is often mistaken as a feminist short story. She tries to tell its readers how women have been confined in this “domestic role” since the beginning of time. The narrator uses the wallpaper to represent the society she lives in. Not only does the wallpaper affect the narrator, but also it influences everyone that meets it. And how these roles ultimately will drive any woman insane.

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1195 Words | 5 Pages

“Madwomen” Live under the Patriarchy’s Places Virginia Woolf said that a woman must have a room of her own and enough money. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper and A Rose for Emily, the two female protagonists have single rooms but these rooms not completely belong to them. They still live the rooms under the control of patriarchy for a long time, which make them lose themselves and twist their mentality. They have no choice to use an anomalous or extreme way to revenge male unequal behavior and they finally become “madwomen” in other people’s eyes. “Madwomen” lacks care and equal treatment so they not only need a concrete room, but also need a spiritual single room.

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1155 Words | 5 Pages

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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1106 Words | 5 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, Jane, has postpartum depression. In order to cure this depression, John, Jane’s husband and a doctor, administer the rest treatment on her. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her personal experience. Along with writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” she wrote an explanation for why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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1091 Words | 5 Pages

She identified the yellow wallpaper as a metaphor for women’s discourse. The narrator’s underlying feelings of confusion, depression, and frustration was covered by the yellow wallpaper which she rips from the walls at the very end to reveal “what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque or fails to perceive at all” (35). The yellow wallpaper is interpreted as the conflict of gender inequality and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The imagery reflects on how women feel toward sexual inequality and the situation with

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