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¶ … Yellow Wallpaper" a feminist text. What work women American culture turn century? How wife defeat patriarchal culture represented attitude husband?
Consider "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a feminist text. What does the work say about women and American culture at the turn of the century? How does the wife defeat the patriarchal culture represented in the attitude of her husband?
The story of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story of a 'cure' that kills. In the story, the unnamed narrator is forced to undergo a 'rest cure' in which she is denied all stimulation. Bored and unable to read or expend her intellectual or emotional energy, she slowly goes mad, eventually coming to imagine that there is a trapped, suffering woman behind the yellow wallpaper of her rented bedroom. The trapped woman is imaginary and is rather a fiction produced of the narrator's diseased brain. The imaginary woman is a metaphorical representation of all suffering women, unable to breathe because of the strictures of patriarchal society.
At the time when Charlotte Perkins Gillman published "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1899 it was much-discussed amongst medical professionals...
Significantly, the narrator's husband John claims to 'know best' and uses his supposed medical knowledge to exercise tyranny over his wife's behavior. He uses his privileged male position as a doctor to keep his wife a virtual prisoner of her home. Gillman suggests that, regardless of the health of the woman, this was not an unusual state of affairs during this era. Middle-class women were said to be so delicate that they could not endure the pressures of work, although lower-class women routinely worked in very laborious positions. False assumptions about the female body had real, material effects over women's economic life and personal autonomy.
Gillman shows that the supposed 'nature' of women -- a lack of intelligence, mental fragility, nervousness, and physical ailments -- were actually caused by a lack of activity and the supposed 'correct' lifestyle of a woman. The natural state of affairs of the human brain is to be occupied, and when denied occupation it naturally engages in morbid fantasies and activities, such as imagining…
References
Gillman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1899. [8 Dec 2012]
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html
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
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"
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
As the text by Davison (2004) contributes, "given that the narrator in Gilman's tale is a femme couverte who has no legal power over her own person -- like her flesh-and-blood counterparts at the time the story was published -- and that her husband is a physician whose pronouncements about his wife's illness are condoned by a spectral yet powerful medical establishment, it is no wonder that his wife grows
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" writing styles; James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" compare to my own life. Modernism vs. postmodernism Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, American literature began to turn inward. Instead of looking to outer manifestations of the human character, American authors began to use interior monologues as a way of creating a narrative arc. Stories such as