¶ … Yellow Wallpaper and Paul's Case: Emancipation of Mental Captivity
The two texts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Willa Cather's Paul's Case, portray the main characters with hysteria. Both cases are reactions to the pressures put on them by their families as well as the society. They seem to build mental barriers that cannot be brought down, so called safe heavens, escape from harsh realities and this puts them on a self-destruction course. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is the main character, an upper middle class woman confined to domesticity and "women's role. The text reveals her inner struggles and from her eye, the reader is able to see her plight. Similarly in Paul's Case, the main character has personal issues that are products of the society he lives in. He is motherless, thin pale and dreamy adolescent who rebels from his conventional surroundings in Pittsburgh. The major characters in both stories are portrayed as having mental disorders. However, their psychological issues are more than their personal problem; instead, these individualu psychological illnesses are the symptoms of the society they live in. Both the authors use these elements to outline social and family issues and how they influence the end of the stories.
Gilman and Cather use psychological symptoms as a means to articulate their social critiques. In The Yellow Wallpaper the conventions of psychological tale is used to critic the role of women in marriage more so the elite during the 1890's. The author reveals the struggles of women during this period, where they assumed second class citizenry. Women were to undertake domestic work as their role in marriage while the men were the professionals. The Yellow Wallpaper reveals the gender disparity in the society and the role of men in dwarfing women in a childish state impeding their development. Women's place was at home as house helps they were to be seen and not heard. They suffered discrimination silently most of them were subjected to child rearing, cooking for the families. The author portrays John as a typical man of that period, he thinks highly of himself thereby patronizing, misjudging and dominating his wife (Gilman 576). He does all this in the pretext of helping her get well. The reader sees her world as ruined by male chauvinism manifested in her husband who has reduced her to a petulant child, unable to fend for herself. On the same line, in Paul's Case, Willa Cather seems to paint Paul in a different light from the other children in the story. Paul's is alienated from his environment and the reader is subjected to the feeling that Paul a young boy without a mother, with a busy father the major authority figures in Paul's life and mean teachers (Cather 264). The author portrays Paul as alienated with lack of human caring would have been helped by human caring.
The symptoms of hysteria in The Yellow wallpaper are synonymous to those of a dysfunctional marriage and problematic gender relations. Just as in Paul's Case it symbolizes disconnection with the society's expectations. It appears as though the narrator is struggling with mental constraints resulting to the symptoms of hysteria. She is afraid of exposing her anxieties because this will reveal her unhappy marriage to John. She is forced to remain silent and idle in pursuit of wellness, this compulsory passiveness prevents her from putting her mind to use. John her Husband warns her to exercise self-control afraid of what is in her mind, "you will never for one minute let that idea enter your mind" (Gilman 582). In the same line, Paul's paranoia, constant fear, and notorious theatrical aversions to school and Cordelia Street, says much about his middle-class upbringing and the religious doctrine that surrounds him. Paul's father just like most of the people living in Cordelia Street, were respectable middle class who believed in the values of hard work, family and church. This could suggest the genesis of Paul's desire to become rich. During their leisure time, the people at Cordelia Street sat around talking about their bosses referred to as the captains of industry who came from humble backgrounds to head large companies and live in luxury "yet he rather liked to hear these legends of iron kings" (Cather 268). This American dream of wealth might have been responsible for corrupting and instilling in him love of materialism that finally led to his ruin. To Paul, the prosy male teachers at school who do not wear violets in their button-holes...
Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published in 1892. The story touches upon themes of patriarchy, misogyny, identity, disenfranchisement, and mental illness. Told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, the reader gets a glimpse into the effect of patriarchy on individual women and on women collectively. The story begins when the narrator and her husband John spend the summer in a holiday house. The
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 portrays that the protagonist in the story, Jane is mentally disturbed. Due to various factors and social pressures, Jane is affected with a mental condition that causes her to lose her mind and be out of touch with reality. The diagnoses that can be made about Jane from The Yellow Wallpaper are of Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type and Bipolar Disorder Type I. Schizophrenia- Paranoid Type As defined in the DSM-IV (APA,
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
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"
Yet, in this case, the freedom that the author is talking about is not necessarily the liberation of women from the oppressive male society, but the freedom of each individual with mental problems to having a socially integrated life, with little or no confinement that would also make the mental problems develop. In conclusion, although it may seem that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written with a feminist
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