Women in society: roles, representation, and impact

¶ … Yellow Wallpaper,' the nameless narrator is compelled by those that surround her to spend time in a colonial mansion in order to rest and get well. The opposite happens; we see her descend into madness in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of the main character in 'The Shining.' We are given the sense of a controlled environment, in which a narrator is placed by male figures representing authority and familiarity (doctors: her husband and brother) in a situation where she is condemned to stare at a wall. The response of her subconscious is embodied in the changes she perceives in the character of the wall.

She sees a yellow female woman trying to break free of the wall, which we interpret to represent the constrained parameters of her activity. She is a complete subordinate, dominated by men who possess professional accolades. Her attitudes mirror those we see in Ibsen novels; that of an overgrown child that is not quite able to make decisions for herself. Her sense of free will is embodied in the mysterious character that lurks behind the wallpaper, threatening to invade her world and disrupt her stability.

In this novel, set in Victorian times, our perspective of women is narrowed to these two entities. One is seen as the id of the other, the subconscious desire for independence. The narrator is seen as a flawed character whose ideas and opinions are seen as the result of her condition. In many ways, this is not only a critique of male authority but also a critique of conventional ideas of dementia and the categorization of radical opinions as those that reflect some malady. The authorities have complete authority over their own actions; they remind us of the clergy responsible for diagnosing women as being witches in the 17th century. The narrator's sublimation is seen as being as important to her sanctioned captors as her recovery; a device designed to mask the arbitrary approach to medicine employed by late 19th century doctors. These are in fact allegorical for all social forces constraining women.

Susan Cahn's work reflects on the self-identity of lesbians; in it she questions both the relevance and the valence of certain social activities generally associated with lesbians and with 'mannish' women. She takes time to question whether or not these connote a social constraint on the female identity. Her ideas reflect those first introduced to the world of critical theory by Simone de Beauvoir in 'The Second Sex.' However, Cahn extends de Beauvoir's premises to queer theory, questioning the way that lesbians are perceived as behaving in a social setting.

Cahn's focus is on the world of female sports. In many sports, female athletic prowess is seen as connoting 'mannishness;' implying that one cannot be a true woman without embodying characteristics traditionally thought of as feminine. Outside these parameters, one looses one's sexual identity and instead is associated with the other sex. If a woman acts like a man, she displays stereotypical male characteristics such as initiative and physical prowess. Cahn contends that one's nature is almost never seen independently, but rather through the lens of gender, and that this creates enmity in organized female sports.

In 'Selling hot *****,' bell hooks writes about an excursion to a local haunt from the university where she observes chocolate breasts. She interprets these as some deep structural longing for the commoditization of black women, for a day in which women could be bought and sold on the market. In this, her lens is rather narrow; the commoditization of women is alive and well in many areas of the world, although it is understandable for a black woman to read racist overtones into the gesture.

The breasts to her also represented the black breasts of the 'mammies' that often nursed southern white children. Here she communicates more about her own misgivings than about southern cuture: only a minority of white children indeed had 'mammies' to care for them. The commoditization of sex is today often associated with Thailand and other parts of Asia. In the southern jazz culture of New Orleans, the term 'china' was often used to refer to fatherless mulatto prostitutes that were the favorites of high-spending Creoles. In a way, however, this confirms her perspective of sexuality in black women as being 'deviant' in that these 'china' women were seen as mules; that the auger of miscegenation was seen as so threatening to society that mulatto women were never seen in context as members of stable, healthy families, but rather as Chinese prostitutes. To some extent, the alienness of mulattos is reflected upon by Faulkner in 'Go Down, Moses.'