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The Yellow Wallpaper Feminist Analysis Essay

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” perfectly lends itself to the eye of a feminist critic. Gilman’s narrator is highly unreliable as she recounts the horrifying treatment she received from her controlling husband and his complicit sister to destroy who this woman and completely eliminate her autonomy. This woman’s secretive journaling, though fictional, captures the essence of feminist issues in the Gothic era. In his chapter on Feminism, Robert Dale Parker states that it is a criticism mostly based off of issues with identity. Throughout Gilman’s story, her main character’s identity is slowly stripped down and reduced to nothing. So much so that she isn’t even clearly named in her own story. She spends her days living under …show more content…

She is the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator and perhaps this is the result of a phenomenon identified by Robert Dale Parker in his chapter on psychoanalytic criticism known as considerations of representations. This phenomenon causes people to focus on the less difficult memories and push the difficult memories and problems to the side while choosing to think in great detail about the easy everyday moments. It could be argued that the entirety of The Yellow Wallpaper is a representation of this psychological response. She focuses on the mundane aspects of her days while only touching upon the difficulties. Though she had probably given birth within a year, she only acknowledges her child once and very briefly and despite the fact that she is clearly traumatized by her husband’s barbaric treatment of her mind, she chooses to focus on the kind and loving nature that she still sees in him. It can take more than one reading to truly understand the brevity of this woman’s struggle as she clearly cannot handle the emotional toll it would take on her to write about her pain. Her journalings of simple things are probably her most cathartic exercise even if she must realize that her husband in all of his well-meaning will never let her do it in

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The narrator is certain she is really sick, and not just nervously depressed as diagnosed by her husband, but she is confined by her role as a wife and woman, and cannot convince her relatives and friends that something is actually wrong with her. In the story the narrator says, “”If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the

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Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity. In addition to physical descriptions, a sense of identity can be established through the delivery of relationships with others, and moral beliefs. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the interplay of characters plays a key role in defining the narrator’s identity through the imbalance of power in her marriage with John. Gilman arguably presents the narrator’s descent into madness through her inability to create a new identity counter to John’s entrapment of her.

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Unreliable narrators are in first person, which of course makes sense because it’s easier to make the deception apparent since you’re in that character’s head. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narration is through a journal she keeps in secret. Thus, allowing her to write down in first person all of the things she is going

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One of the emotions the narrator undergoes is intimidation toward her husband. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” it says, “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?” The narrator is a woman and has no say about her own medical condition, due to the fact that she is a female, but her husband can say and tell her whatever he wants to about her condition and that intimidates her. He can have complete control over the narrator because he is more educated than her and he has a higher standing in society than women did. Another example of the narrator’s intimidation for the husband is in “The Yellow Wallpaper” it says, “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes.

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The narrator reinforces that there are many influences in one’s life. First, the narrator’s husband has a demanding impact on her personal truth as he enforces his thoughts in her life. Similarly, the narrator’s activities throughout her journey to insanity demonstrate that each person approaches mental illness differently. In addition, the narrator’s childhood interests influence her beliefs and the truth by which she lives. In summary, the text, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates that as the narrator fights through insanity, she determines her personal truth in her own reality.

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In the 1800s a woman would go undiagnosed with depression due to the idea of women having hysteria versus a legitimate mental health issue. In the Yellow Wallpaper, Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper and the Awakening the mental illness is apparent. All three women are suffering from some sort of mental illness which has not been addressed which leads to the oppression of women. Not because doctors or men did intentionally try to hurt them but lack of knowledge and care were a major issue. First to start out with the Why I wrote the Yellow Wall Paper Gilman was a women suffering from severe and continuous breakdowns in the 1800s.

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Firstly, the story is a journal that the narrator is writing while being treated with the rest cure, which she keeps a secret from her husband, sister and others who come to visit her. As the journal progresses, the narrator’s writing demonstrates her fall to insanity. In the beginning, the narrator sees her journal is an adequate method of escape from her illness and her situation. As the narrator’s mind grows more and more crazed, she develops an urge to physically escape from the room that she is isolated in, which occurs at the end of the story. The narrator’s journaling was simply a small step that contributed to her ultimate freedom.

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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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Everything from how her interactions with her family to her perception of her environment and how it evolves throughout the story allow the reader to almost feel what the narrator is feeling as the moves through the story. In the beginning, the only reason the reader knows there may be something wrong with the narrator is because she comes right out and says she may be ill, even though her husband didn’t believe she was (216). As the story moves on, it becomes clear that her illness is not one of a physical nature, but of an emotional or mental one. By telling the story in the narrator’s point of view, the reader can really dive into her mind and almost feel what she’s feeling.

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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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To capture the reader’s attention Charlotte Gilman uses a short story demonstration fear and insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Gilman uses imagery to illustrate how a limited role of a female in society can drive her insane. The house portrays the narrator's isolation.

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Throughout short fiction, Charlotte Gilman is most famously noted for her ability to create strong gothic themes in her writing. This is especially true in her 1890s story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Overall, an important theme in Charlotte Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that when combined, isolation and oppression often lead to negative consequences such as insanity and mental instability. Gilman achieves this through her thorough use of symbolism and settings that helps to highlight and establish the overall theme.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not just an author but a great feminist. Gillam inspired countless women to seek indecency with her work like "The Yellow Wallpaper. " The story is a fictionalized short story of a woman who is descending into madness while dealing with her mental illness and cannot heal due to her husband 's lack of belief. At the same time, the woman also known as the narrator feels imprisoned in her marriage. The story takes place during a time were women and had no independence and were not able to voice their own opinion.

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In American Literature, there is a woman who was polemical in the 19th century for her writings. She was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman who found herself in the progressive era, where women were trying to open their path to equality, and during this process, Gilman saw many injustices against her gender, making her act with the creation of writings where she expressed all of this and influenced feminism across the US. In fact, The Yellow Wallpaper is one her most famous literary pieces and is the one that will be discussed in the following lines. Charlotte Perkins Gilman use of symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper is present in almost any paragraph, making it the main literary device applied to address the moral issue on feminism concerns and the male superiority complex along with the social norms of the

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