A response on The Yellow Wallpaper - Thesis Example

?The Yellow Wallpaper--a response Introduction Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in the times of great transition of women’s roles from the middle class in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century America. Throughout the the text, a strong feminist attitude prevails in the tone and theme accentuated by the main character. Although Gilman herself revealed that her purpose of writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to disagree with the “rest cure” imposed by her psychiatrist, the text itself revealed the yearnings of women for equal rights as represented by the wallpaper and the insanity portrayed by the narrator, which is seen to be parallel with Hume’s and Schorkhuber’s interpretation as they relate it to Gilman’s biography. The Yellow Wallpaper as Representation of Female Oppression The earliest seeds of feminism brought new changes to the lives of women. During the late 19th Century, they began to express demands on equality, along with the rapid industrialization and their inclusion in the workforce. Gilman’s short fiction reveals the restriction of women’s roles in the society. There are various things that the narrator sees within the yellow wallpaper, which are actually expressions of resistance for the unequal treatment of women in that time. According to Hume, “The Yellow Wallpaper" appears to be a text that simultaneously mirrors Gilman's ideological limitations as a feminist reformer, and symbolically moves beyond those limitations” (par. 4) The first time the narrator is in the room where the wallpaper is found, she just described it as a “particularly irritating one” (9). However, the longer she stayed in the room, the more fixated she becomes with the wallpaper. It is noticed that the intensity of adjectives used to describe the wallpaper increases. For example, the narrator describes it to be “irritating,” “horrid,” and “hideous;” the increasing intensity of the descriptions may connote that the more society suppresses women’s rights, the more they are encouraged to fight for it. On the other hand, it could also describe the feeling of women towards their limitations to ‘motherly roles.’ When the narrator’s obsession is at peak, she described the wallpaper to be “hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing” (15). Such statement might describe men as “hideous” because of the restrictions they made for women. The ‘ugliness’ portrayed by the wallpaper mirrors what the author sees in her society: the distorted and often absolute roles that women must portray because of social expectations. In the middle to the last part of the story, the narrator hallucinates about a “faint figure behind that seems to shake the pattern” as if “[it] wants to get out” (14). In this part, the theme becomes more apparent, as it implies about the women to be prisoners of their own household. As the “faint figure” disturbs the narrator’s mind, the more she feels that she has to help her get out of that wallpaper. This empathy would suggest that the author herself experienced the same kind of imprisonment, and having known the difficulty of being oppressed, she wanted to set that woman in the wallpaper free. In the end however, the narrator concludes that she is one of them, that she is one of the women locked in that wall. The narrator declared that “[she] get[s] out at last” and “[they] can’t put her back” because she peeled off all of the wallpaper (26). The Narrator’s Insanity as an Effect of Suppression By the birth of her only daughter Katherine, Gilman suffered from post-partum depression where women tend to be hysterical and nervous. The narrator of the story shows the same symptoms as she “gets so nervous” when she is close to her baby (6). As a treatment, the narrator’s husband, John, and her brother, as they are both doctors of high acclaim, advised her to refrain from any kind of work. Ironically however, John sees nothing wrong with her wife, yet he does not allow her to do anything not until “[she] is well again” (2). This irony might be looked upon as a bigger picture of male dominance and denial over the needs of women. Although John is presented as a good husband to the narrator, he paralyzed his wife by restricting her to do anything. The “rest cure” implemented by the narrator’s husband provoked desperation in the narrator’s part and eventually leading her to a more serious condition. Rest cure was initially given to soldiers to relieve them from war shock, later it was adapted by psychologists on women to make them recover from the stress brought by domestic life. However, the opposite happened to Gilman, that instead of relaxation, she “contemplated suicide” (Schorkhuber 6). Because of this, she was more into encouraging women to do what they want and “consistently rejected conventional mental health "cures" and surround themselves with “compassionate and supportive communities” (Hume par. 17). At first, the mental state of the main character causes dilemma for the readers, of whether or not something is wrong with her. This confusion stems from the opinion of John and the narrator herself about the current mental state of the narrator. John says that there is nothing really serious about his wife’s psychological state but the narrator declares that she knows that there is something wrong about her. One can say that there is a lapse of judgment in John’s part. The narrator says: “He (John) knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (5). As a physician, John fails to investigate further the condition of his wife, and as a representation of the general ideology about women in that time, John denies the need of his wife for acknowledgement. In the first parts of the story, the narrator repeatedly asks: “What one has to do?” The tone of the question lies between the borders of submission and emotional paralysis, that because someone of high standing asserts that she is well, she has no right to express what she truly feels. As a semi-autobiographical text, Gilman also noted the interest of the narrator to write, but her present condition made her husband and her brother forbid her to do so. She objected this kind of treatment and “believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good” (2). In the end, she still asks, “what one has to do?” to state that in that time, she is powerless and has to be submissive because her husband has higher social standing than her. However, her husband’s orders were not absolutely followed. She still writes when her husband is out and no one is watching her because it would “relieve the press of ideas and rest [her]” (7). Conclusion The Yellow Wallpaper is more than just a study of post-partum disorder; rather, it magnifies social inequality experienced by women during the later years of the 19th Century. It serves as a statement to denounce uniformity of women’s lives which followed the pattern of society's expectations towards them. The narrator, although suffering from a psychological disorder, is well aware about how she is imprisoned by her husband’s orders and how she is overshadowed by his reputation as a highly acclaimed doctor in their community. The narrator represents how women are disgusted by the limitations set upon them by a highly-patriarchal society. The Yellow Wallpaper should be treated as a written form of the voice of women in the society. Despite of the growing feminist views in the modern society, there are still women who are oppressed and are given unequal importance because of their gender. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New Hampshire: Forgotten Books, 2008. Print. Hume, Beverly A. "Managing Madness in Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper." Studies in American Fiction 30.1 (2002): 3+. Print. Schorkhuber, Verena. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper": An Analysis. Hamburg: GRIN Verlag, 2008. Print. Read More