Gender Roles In The Yellow Wallpaper

  The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can by read in many different ways.  Some think of it as a tragic horror story while others may find it to be a tale of a woman trying to find her identity in a male-dominated society.  The story is based on an episode in Gilman's life when she suffered from a nervous disease called melancholia.  A male specialist advised her to "live a domestic a life as far as possible.. and never to touch a pen, brush or pencil..."   (Gilman, 669).   She lived by these guidelines for three months until she came close to suffering from a nervous breakdown.  Gilman then decided to continue writing, despite the physicians advice, and overcame her illness.

The wallpaper magnifies the problems the narrator is experiencing. The pattern in the wallpaper is not just an innocent pattern for a children's room as it is first introduced to the reader, but rather it has a mind-numbing quality that readily attracts the projections of the unbalanced mind.

While the narrator describes what she calls a nursery type bedroom with barred windows and rings on the wall her ancestral home, the audience soon realizes that this is her bedroom in an old insane asylum. She stares for long periods at this patchy yellow wallpaper around her room. She thinks that the boys who previously lived in this home ripped the paper down the sides

In addition, the narrator shows signs of insanity by her having hallucinations. While she is staring at the wallpaper she sees people and objects appear ON the wall in the wallpaper. At first she just describes the wallpaper as if a boy’s school used it. She notices every tiny defect in the wallpaper, she notices the tiny little scratches that not everybody will be able to see. Throughout the story the narrator was letting the paper get the best of her so John did not repaper the wall although he wanted to. Obvious signs of insanity were when the

She describes the wallpaper as “dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate” (Gilman). The narrator is not thinking much about the wallpaper and she is only briefly annoyed by it. “This wallpaper has a kind of

However, her husband has refused to change the wallpaper. For example, “At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (544). Having her husband control her environment was one step in the process of her losing her sanity, another thing that was causing her to feel confined was the control her husband had over her

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has several major themes that were expressed. In the nineteenth century, women were responsible for doing house chores, taking care of the kids, and obeying their husbands. A general concern regarding women’s inequality during the 19th century was painted by Gilman. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman emphasizes the concerns in which society discouraged the women’s ability to self express themselves. Does the narrator listen to the man because he’s a physician or because he is her husband?

Gender roles seem to be as old as time and have undergone constant, but sometime subtle, revisions throughout generations. Gender roles can be defined as the expectations for the behaviors, duties and attitudes of male and female members of a society, by that society. The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is a great example of this. There are clear divisions between genders. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century where a rigid distinction between the domestic role of women and the active working role of men exists (“Sparknotes”). The protagonist and female antagonists of the story exemplify the women of their time; trapped in a submissive, controlled, and isolated domestic sphere, where they are treated

Throughout the story the narrator is obsessed with the wallpaper, it seems that she has

Furthermore it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to discern what the truth actually is because as the story progresses it becomes apparent that the narrator is an unreliable one. Throughout the story one of the biggest causes for the woman’s frustration and unease is the yellow wallpaper in her room. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and slowly allows it to drive her closer to insanity because of other people’s reluctance to acknowledge her opinions and mental illness. At the beginning the young woman simply harbours a strong dislike for the wallpaper as shown by her portrayal of it when she first sees it. The young woman describes it as being “repellant, almost revolting”(649) and mentions that she “never saw a worse paper in [her] life” (648). However, after a while, the young woman begins to refer to the wallpaper as almost a living, breathing entity and allows it to consume her thoughts without ever letting her husband know what is happening. This disturbing behaviour is evident once she begins to see shapes and eyes moving about inside the paper “up and down and sideways” (650) and feels as though she cannot escape because “those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere” (650). Finally it all becomes too much for the woman to handle and she begins to experience full fledged hallucinations. “The front pattern

    In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the reader is treated to an intimate portrait of developing insanity. At the same time, the story's first person narrator provides insight into the social attitudes of the story's late Victorian time period. The story sets up a sense of gradually increasing distrust between the narrator and her husband, John, a doctor, which suggests that gender roles were strictly defined; however, as the story is just one representation of the time period, the examination of other sources is necessary to better understand the nature of American attitudes in the late 1800s. Specifically, this essay will analyze the representation of

The author chose diction to portray the husband as a controlling man to represent the inequality women felt in marriages in the nineteenth century. John, the husband and physician of the sick woman, downplayed the severity of his wife’s illness which, made her illness intensify.

The first sentence of “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives insight to the setting of the story and essential

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.