Her mother gave her little affection, believing she would never know the pain of rejection if she never experienced love. (Vosberg para. 13)
The clear need her character has for a family and for overt family support, as well as the suspicions that develop in her mind about the others in the house, reflect this sort of youth in many ways.
The enclosed world of the protagonist is a representation of the closed world of the writer, a world carried out largely in the mind of the writer. The protagonist speaks through her journal, her means of artistic expression, and from the beginning it is clear that she is treated as someone who needs to be cared for and protected to the point where she has little choice in her own destiny. Her husband and sister-in-law do not want her to write in her journal at all, believing that it tires her out to think when they are there to think for her. The point-of-view in this story is hers throughout, and it is a point-of-view isolated from other people, directed into a journal, and unrestrained in terms of any need to please other eyes.
She describes herself and her husband as "ordinary people" who are presently living in a house quite unlike that which they would normally have. She has fanciful ideas about the house from the beginning -- the house was cheap, so she believes it must be haunted or have some other secret that sets it apart. Her husband laughs at these ideas, but it is clear that he often laughs at her ideas and treats her as someone who is foolish and in need of protection. In the beginning, the woman expresses the feeling that she could work and that the others are wrong for stopping her, but she is not overly critical of them for...
She says she disagrees: "But what is one to do?" She has a sense of confinement that is heightened by the bars like jail bars that she sees on the wallpaper, and we discover later that her own windows have bars on them, bars to keep her inside. Even without the physical bars, she is kept inside by the tenor of the times and by the way women are prevented from going into the outside world on an equal footing with men. It seems clear that Gilman had these same feelings even as she fought against them and asserted herself in the world of letters. She writes a work of fiction that takes its cue not just from the real world but from her own life and the mode of thought she has developed in her life. She addresses the issues of importance to her from that time, and she does so in a powerful and memorable way. In that process, Gilman used her pen vividly to release her experiences of pain, depression, and female oppression.
Works Cited
Charlotte (Anna) Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)." Books and Writers (2003). http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gilman.htm.
Di Grazia, Jodi. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860-1935." 14 Dec 1998. November 1, 2005. http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/cgilman.html.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." In Fiction: A Pocket Anthology 4th edition, R.S. Gwynn (ed.), 88-103. New York: Penguin Academics, 2005.
Jacobus, Mary. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Vosberg, Alicia. "The Evolution of the Woman's Rights Movement
In the Nineteenth Century." 1999. November 1, 2005. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1999/vosberg.html.
