The Orphanage Analysis

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Orphanage, directed by J.A Bayona, are both female driven stories, and due to a lack of dominant female roles in books and television, these pieces are statements of our society. The 19th century had few feminine rights and strict gender roles. A time when a large population of women were thought to have a form of mental illness, and due to a lack of medical knowledge were vastly mistreated. The lapse in medicinal science, in combination with extremely sexist ideologies caused further harm to come to women than help. The Yellow Wallpaper, with a nameless female Narrator, depicts how women seen as unwell were treated in the 1900’s. The Orphanage, through the protagonist Laura, portrays

Binary oppositions are the culture construed ‘opposites’ that are not always accurate, and tend to exclude a number of variations in the spectrum. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the Narrator is erected in her society as ‘the other’ on one side of the spectrum, and is subjugated to men, on the ‘elite’ opposite,“Mitchell shared the general belief that the best cure for female neurasthenia was to reorient them to domestic life”(Poirie). Doctors and male authority figures, truly believed that acting against gender norms would cause women to fall ill. However, with the progress made in between timelines, Laura is viewed as an independent woman, who cares for her family. There are little to no instances where Laura is disrespected or treated as ‘less-than’ due to her being a woman. Whereas every issue the Narrator faces are namely due to her being a woman in her time period. As previously stated, physicians were dominantly male and abused their power to further the notions that anything other than a domestic life is lethal to women. If doctors of that time period had been objective, they would not have been blind to the effects they were having on female patients, and noted the differing treatments for

Her value system is heavily validation based, with her needs with little to no consideration or relevance. Her husband 's ideology mirrors this and thus he thinks of highly himself, and her irrelevant. This ideology is best portrayed when The Narrator comments, “If a physician of high standing, and one 's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do? [...] Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (648). The Narrator portrays her husband as her foil, an overwhelming power that she is too weak to overcome. She is unsure of how to assert her agency, and protesting her husband’s ideas does not even cross her mind as an option. Just from this brief excerpt, she establishes how others view her as less than her husband, so much so that none take into account anything she says of her own health and wellbeing- her husband 's words being enough and