Yellow Wallpaper" a Feminist Text. What Work

¶ … 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 at the time as to whether women had physical constitutions that would allow them to support intensive studying. 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 the yellow wallpaper to be concealing another human being.

Given that the narrator has just given birth, there are also indications that the medical profession because of its male dominance is unable to understand specifically 'female' complaints, such as postpartum depression. The state of the female body is perpetually confused throughout the story with the state of the female brain, and because the unnamed narrator looks better to the exterior world, at least according to her husband, it is assumed she is mentally healed. "Really dear you are better!" [John said].

"Better in body perhaps -- ' I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word." Rather than listening to his wife's actual feelings and perceptions, John can only hear and see his own conceptions of how a woman should be and how he wants his wife to seem.

The end of the story is laden with irony: it is John who faints when he sees his wife systematically tearing the wallpaper off of the room, trying to free the woman. Through her determination the wife acts as a 'savior' of the imaginary captive woman who is really an extension of herself. However, in defeating her husband by determinedly.