Virginia Woolf's The Yellow Wallpaper

Women have been devalued by men for as long as people can remember. In the past, when men were off at war, women had to work jobs and keep the country running but as soon as the men returned, the women had to return to the kitchen. Women being the second option, the backup if the male species were to be killed off. In the story, “What if Shakespeare had a sister”, Virginia Woolf discusses how poorly women were treated in society. Women were deprived of all their rights, being nothing more than a house wife, being limited to their potential. In, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story of a woman being trapped and living in a patriarchal world. In the poem “Quincenanera” Judith Ortiz Cofer, discusses a girl growing into

For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people” (779). Without an education, a women could not have the knowledge of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was not born with such intelligence e, he learned and was taught, women were not allowed of such a thing. No women was capable to have the knowledge Shakespeare contained. Gilman states, “He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (550?). Writing would help her with her condition, but the husband discourages it. She has many ideas and writing them out would help her, but if she were to write and it was extraordinary, she would not be able to share it. Women shouldn’t be able to write better than

All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” (780). Even if a brilliant women, as brilliant as Shakespeare did exist in the past, she wouldn’t be happy as she would live a life of misery. She would be able to share her brilliance with anyone, making her gift of knowledge useless. Not being able to share, would make her go madly insane. Gilman states, “… for the windows are bared for little children, and there rings and things in the wall. The paint and paper looks as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach…” (548). the room sounds more of a room for the insane than it does a nursery. No surprise, that this woman is in such a room, she is sick and can’t even do the work she enjoys because the men in her life don’t allow