Control In The Yellow Wallpaper

In her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expresses exasperation towards the separate male and female roles expected of her society, and the evident repressed rights of a woman versus the active duties of a man. The story depicts the methods taken to cure a woman of her psychological state during Gilman’s time, and delineates the dominant cure of the time period, “the resting cure,” which encouraged the restraint of the imagination ("The Yellow Wallpaper: Looking Beyond the Boundaries") Gilman uses the unnamed narrator to represent the average repressed woman of her time and how her needs were neglected in an attempt to mark a fixed distinction between the standards and expectations of men and women. John, the narrator’s husband, take the designated and patriarchal role of a man who believes he knows everything there is to know about the human mind. His belief of his superior knowledge pushes him to condescend, overshadow, and misunderstand his wife. As a result, his wife loses control of her life and escapes into her own fantasy world, where she is able dominate her imagination, free her mind, and fall into insanity. Gilman describes her era’s approach toward female psychology in order to criticize the patriarchal society she lived in as well as to reveal its effects on the women of her time.

John is introduced into the story by the narrator as soon as the story starts. The narrator describes him as "practical in the extreme." He has "no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talks of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." Although the narrator describes him as these things, they are married and she, undoubtedly, loves him. She continues on by saying " John is a physician and perhaps... that is one reason I do not get well faster." This description paints the husband, John, as controlling over his wife.

John takes her sensitivity as a sign of lacking "proper self-control" (Gilman 179). Because of his callous opinion, she must hide parts of herself. This reminds the reader of a parent telling a child to grow up. The colorful, sensitive side of her psyche is being pushed aside for his more black-and-white male perspective. His view is one of a colorless world that is cut, dried, and neatly organized with no room for varying shades. If he can't see or touch it, then it doesn't exist. Beverly Hume writes, "John is mechanistic, rigid, predictable, and sexist; he 'combines' as Rachael Duplesis notes 'the professional authority of the physician with the legal and emotional authority of the husband'" (478).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a short story, published in the late 1800s, about one woman’s descent to madness. Finding herself plagued with postpartum depression after the birth of her son, the narrator’s ailment is overlooked by everyone around her. Her husband, “...a physician of high standing..” (Gilman) describes the narrator’s illness as “temporary nervous depression...a slight hysterical tendency.” Her brother and male doctor, also agree with this diagnosis and because so, the narrator is forced to go through a rather peculiar treatment plan that was commonly practiced on women who were considered hysterical during that time period. Considered a societal norm this treatment plan, created by the dominate male,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of a woman who goes mad while fixating on a bizarre wall-covering has been used as an early example of post-partum depression. In the latter part of the 1800’s women were seen as inferior subordinates to men who could not be trusted due to the effect of the female organs on their brains. The narrator is almost certainly a victim of the lack of medical knowledge of the day, while the prevailing attitudes in the medical field of women as childlike and the social pressure of male domination contribute to the narrator’s illness. The husband’s role as spouse and physician enable his benevolent manipulation of the narrator by isolating her and removing her

In the beginning of the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John and his wife relocate to an ancestral home located some 3 miles away from the nearest village. John is a medical practitioner and is very well known around the area. It is very common that her husband will be called to come to very serious cases that many times result in his staying away for days at a time. Originally John believed that his wife suffered from severe depression. This idea was also backed by her brother who is also a doctor.

Throughout the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we see a woman handicapped by depression and mental illness. We see how the narrator and John interact as husband and wife and as doctor and patient. From the surface, it seems as if John is a kind-hearted man wanting what is best for his wife, and willing to do whatever it takes to make her better again. But as the reader looks closer and the story progresses, John becomes more of a handicap to his wife than the illness itself. Gilman uses John's detriment to Charlotte as a way to describe the gender roles, professional and medial, in the nineteenth century. She uses this parallelism as a way to break the patriarchal society's oppression on women and the idea of

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Gilman is a chilling portrayal of a woman’s downward spiral towards madness after undergoing treatment for postpartum depression in the 1800’s. The narrator, whose name remains nameless, represents the hundreds of middle to upper- class women who were diagnosed with “hysteria” and prescribed a “rest” treatment. Although Gilman’s story was a heroic attempt to “save people from being driven crazy” (Gilman p 1) by this type of “cure” it was much more. “The Yellow Wallpaper” opened the eyes of many to the apparent oppression of women in the 1800’s and “possibly the only way they could (unconsciously) resist or protest their traditional ‘feminine’

During the late 19th century women, as history demonstrates, were to remain confined to their societal expectations and roles. Women were thought of as the weaker sex, emotional, and fully dependent on their male counterparts, child-like. She was to be a pious woman, living a life of true domesticity. If a woman was not able to function in her role as a mother and submissive wife, then she was thought of to be simply undergoing hysteria. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in 1892, we are introduced to an unnamed woman suffering from this “nervous depression” (1). This woman and her husband John, who is a “physician of high standing” (1), are taking a three-month vacation in an old colonial mansion. It is in this haunted house that the reader is able to see the psychological deterioration of the woman as she lives under a demanding patriarchal society.

“ [I] came perilously near to losing my mind. The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side”, Charlotte Gilman writes after a month of following the “rest cure”. The rest cure is summed up by not forcing women to nothing. Men in the nineteenth century dominated women, treating them like children, causing them to go insane. Jane and her husband, John, move into a mansion for Jane to get some “air”, yet she ends up feeling trapped and going crazy. Gilman deals with a very real issue from the nineteenth century through the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

The narrator’s feelings of inferiority and powerlessness parallels the female figure she sees trapped behind the pattern in the wall-paper adorning her room. She gradually withdraws from both John and reality by locking herself in the room and ultimately merging with the figure. Through the changing image of the pattern from a “fait figure” (Gilman 46) to a “woman stooping” (Gilman 46) behind the paper and “shaking the bars” (Gilman 46) as if she wanted “to get out” (Gilman 46), we can see her becoming one with the figure: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.”(51) Her collapse into madness as reflected in her behavior with the “bedstead [that] is fairly gnawed” (Gilman 51) and her “creeping all around” (Gilman 50) is a direct result of her passive submissiveness to John’s control of her life.

Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is centered on the deteriorating psychological condition of the female narrator. As a woman in a male dominating society in the 19th century, the narrator has no control over her life. This persistence eventually evolves into her madness. The insanity is triggered by her change in attitude towards her husband, the emergent obsession with the wallpaper and the projection of herself as the women behind the wallpaper. The “rest cure” which was prescribed by her physician husband, created the ideal environment for her madness to extend because, it was in her imagination that she had some freedom and control.

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story of a women’s deterioration into mental illness, is a representation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s view on the domination of males in the medical environment, and the patriarchal formation of the household in the nineteenth century. Gilman is informing the reader of the consequences of a male dominated society with fixed gender roles. The man is the authoritative working figure, while the women is confined to her household duties and obeys the authority of her husband. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a depiction of a narrator who is constrained to her gender roles, and develops a worsened illness because of it.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman delves into themes such as mental health, offering a critical perspective on the Rest Cure and the treatment of women’s psychological well-being in the late 19th century. The narrative extensively explores restrictive gender roles, reflecting the protagonist’s struggles within a patriarchal society that cuts back on women’s autonomy. Additionally, the story serves as an early feminist critique, challenging societal norms, power dynamics within marriage and the medical profession, and advocating for women’s agency and resistance against oppressive norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman illuminates the degradation of the protagonist’s mental well-being in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” confined within a room

The short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be interpreted in many ways. Some scholars debate that it is written as an autobiography, some say it is an isolated work, a complete fantasy, or simply just a feminist uprising. One particular scholar even relates the feminism aspect with a feline creature within one scene of the story (Golden 1). Although there are many aspects throughout the text that represent feminism, the main theme that shines through is the story of a woman descending into psychosis. This story explains the close mindedness of how postpartum depression was treated and managed by physicians, and how negatively society viewed mental illnesses. The significance of The Yellow Wallpaper is remarkable