Yellow Wallpaper
The year is 1888, the place is America, the scenes include a country home in rural Massachusetts (where the woman of the house is Dorothy Pilman), a newsroom with typewriters clicking and clacking constantly, and a doctor's office in New York. The reporter is given access to the Pilman family and is invited to conduct interviews.
A Reporter's Narrative
Today, a typical day in the 19th century, American women are looked at as the weaker sex, and doctors are performing some controversial procedures in attempts to "cure" women of their maladies. The woman of today struggles with any illness because the "…male dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women" because males understand women's health problems better than women understand themselves (Cutter, 2001). After all, what do women know about their own bodies and their minds in the late 19th century? Experts like doctors see women as "silent, powerless, and passive," and after giving birth, which is their main purpose in life, many women fall into a state that doctors (including psychologists and psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud) called "hysteria" (Cutter).
There are few very few liberated women in 1888; in fact feminism is not in every dictionary, and women who espouse viewpoints based on feminism are rebuked in this society. A woman like Dorothy who has become depressed following the birth of her child is confined to bed as part of her treatment. In an interview with a female psychologist / author who has observed the treatment of women who are believed to be ill, the author rejected "the rest cure" as a treatment for women. "It is basically a prison for women," the psychologist -- who has been outlawed in Massachusetts from practice because...
Yellow Wallpaper Breaking Free: The Ironic Liberation of "Yellow Wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a quintessential feminist story, even though it can be interpreted on many levels within that rubric. The narrator is married and has a child; she is thus engaged in some of the strongest trappings of a patriarchal society. However, she is removed both physically and spiritually from her stereotyped role as wife and mother. The
Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Specifically it will discuss the effect that point-of-view has on the story. The narrator in this story slowly descends into madness as the story continues, and the first-person point-of-view helps the reader truly feel how the woman feels, and why she goes slowly mad in her own home. The author chose first-person for this story to graphically illustrate how women's lives were ruled over
Similarities in Theme in the Two Stories Prisoners: Both of these stories place the characters in a kind of prison. On the first page of Yellow Wallpaper the narrator has already explained that the reason she doesn't get well is because of her husband. An irony of huge magnitude, to say that one's husband is a physician and that "perhaps" that is the reason "I do not get well faster" (3).
Long before the term postpartum depression became part of the vernacular, Charlotte Perkins Gilman deftly and sensitively describes the complex condition in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The story describes the prevailing attitudes towards women and their narrowly defined roles in society. White, upper middle class women like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” could not easily express discontent with their position as wife and mother. The narrator’s husband—a
I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still... It keep me quiet by the hour" (Hunt, 179). With this, it is clear that Gilman sees herself as trapped in a very disruptive and confined world, one which ultimately drives her insane; also, this mysterious woman is a symbol of her physical self caught within a maze of confusion and despair, all because of the "yellow wallpaper"
As the narrator is denied access to the world and the normal expression of her individuality, so she becomes a true prisoner of the room with the yellow wallpaper. Her life and consciousness becomes more restricted until the wallpaper becomes an animated world to her. There is also the implied suggestion in this process of a conflict between the rational and logical world, determined and controlled by male consciousness, and
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now