The Yellow Wallpaper, feminist text - Essay Example

This narration bears testimony to the fact that from the time of the early half of 19th century, in the field of literature, the pursuit of women to get liberated from the conformist ideas of womanhood that the social order has forced over them, took a dissimilar form. This story continues to remain as a classic document of woman oppression. The story articulates in an artistic paradigm by weaving fiction & reality within the same plot. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was read in print for the first time in 1892 via the New England Magazine, & is widely evaluated as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's best work of short fiction.

The tale is a first-person narrative of a young mother's psychological weakening and is associated & stimulated alongside Gilman's personal understanding with post-partum depression. Like Gilman, the anonymous character of the narrative is recommended, (on grounds of medical theories of the time), to abstain from all kinds of physical activities and cerebral motivation. She is therefore forbidden to read, write, and also look after her new born baby. To carry out this unique treatment, the woman's husband re-allots her to a countryside pavilion where she is confined within a former nursery decorated with yellow wallpaper (Laing).

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ emerges as a stupendous example of a woman’s metaphysical exploitation in the backdrop of an insecure & aggressive male social order. The collection culminates with a few mementos from the author’s autobiography, including a riveting essay on her painful experience of motherhood and postnatal depression. Sometimes the reader may unconsciously fathom about Gilman’s traits as she excessively endorses about suppression without providing any sort of silver lining.

She speaks about the male virus, but does not provide a solution or a cure. Though she was always highly regarded both as a socialist writer and a serious feminist thinker, it often appears that much of her work originated from pure frustration. Gilman would have surely been dismayed to hear it, but more than a century later her stories retain their capacity to burn (Laing). Gilman was a true protege of the western feminist movement. But she alongside other feminist writers created a substantial stir in the western feudal hierarchy.

Feminist literatures began to create a catastrophic turbulence in the psyche of the rigid trans-feudal male chauvinists who viewed the society as a rigid paradox of compartments. The definition of feminism & feministic literature was intertwined with the notion of humanism. For example, 19th century feminists did not support birth controls while 20th century feminists have been able to shed this taboo. Thus Gilman’s feminism was involved with humanism, socialism as well as a tinge of feudalistic trait (Lipman blumen, 11).

With that sort of a ravaged heart, Gilman frames her iconoclastic struggle to upsurge the patriarchal bindings in order to be capable of writing her book ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. She morbidly discusses the repressing care of her spouse as she says, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction… There comes John, and I must put this away, --he hates to have me write a word. We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I