Alternate Feministic Ending to Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper - Term Paper Example

? An Alternate Feministic Ending to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” Then he said – very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my darling!” “I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!” And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door, and before he could even say, “What is the matter?” I jumped on him and caused him to lose balance and drop to the floor head first. While I was on top of him, John wrestled against me with his hand grabbing my hair but my hands squeezing his face and mouth. We rolled and rolled and rolled until I was under him trying to lock his neck with my strong arms. As he struggled to free himself from my grasp, he bit me in the arm and I screamed as blood spurted out of the cut where his sharp teeth buried. While I screamed, he pushed me with his head towards the wall behind me and when I banged my head on the wall with a loud thud, I growled in pain and consequently I loosened my grasp, and he twisted and turned towards me while grasping and squeezing both my wrists with his tight fists and never letting me go. “You whore! How dare you do that to me! What makes you think you are stronger than me? And what makes you think you can get away, huh!” John was screaming at me in a rhythm that corresponded to the thudding that my head made on the wooden floor. All the while I was right! Although I thought once that John loved me very dearly, now I realize that it is never true. That is why I knew I was a little afraid of him, and that is why whenever he came, I had to put this away for he hated to have me write a word. I was momentarily dazed at this shocking realization and then I uttered a muffled cry as John finally grabbed hold of my neck with both hands and started choking the life out of me while I felt my weak legs helplessly kicking at him. Then, as I felt tears coming out of my puffy eyes and oxygen leaving my twitching chest through my gaping mouth, my eyes moved to the back of John as I smelled a familiar odor and witnessed a most horrid sight. My initial reaction was fear as I remembered I have always feared John. But when I saw the creeping women come into the room through the window and as many more came out of the yellow wallpaper from behind me, I knew the day of reckoning came. Their dark creeping shadows loomed around me and John, and I could see the expression on his face change from rage to horror. The creepers had long disheveled hair that hung around to cover some part of their dark, deathly yellowish pale countenance. The deep set eyes and dark circles were perhaps proof of the sleepless nights that they spent in struggling out of the yellow wallpaper. Their arms and legs were twisted perhaps from the pressure of having to shakes the bars of the patterns of the yellow wallpaper. Yet they smelled the same peculiar yellow odor that matched their yellowish skin and teeth. One of the crawling women twisted her bones and sinews several times in order to assume a standing position in front of him while he was there standing petrified in fear and he could feel his he could not move his sinews even a bit. All he could do was utter a shriek akin to that of a child whose head was banged to the wall just like how hard John banged mine several times just a while ago. I also heard from him the same muffled cry of fear that I let out while he was choking me, and my eyes moved to the wet spot in his pants that gradually grew wide as he kept wetting them in horror. As the terrifying figure loomed in on him, John finally screamed but before his instincts could make him punch the figure’s face, two other creepers from the back grabbed his arms and held them behind him. His fear seemed to have drained all the energy out of his body as he merely grimaced and twitched his neck upwards as if avoiding the face that was getting closer and closer to him. His final cry became a gurgling sound as the figure squeezed held his head with both pale deathly hands. I could not anymore make out what was happening to him as the female figure’s back was turned against me covering him John in view. Suddenly, I did not know why I remembered that although John kept me in this room for a long time, he was so wise and that he loved me so. I felt pity for him and despite everything that he did to me and despite how he made me feel all this time in our marriage, I still could not bring myself to hate him or to like what these female creepy crawlers were doing to him. My goal was after all neither dominion over John nor his death but an equality that would make me feel my own true worth. I ran towards the horrid female figure that was causing John’s regurgitating and gagging sounds and as I shoved her aside, she suddenly disappeared as well as all the rest of the creepy crawling women. They all literally vanished into thin air without even creating the faintest sound. I then saw a sticky black liquid coming out of John’s lips, making him look as if he was vomiting. The dark fluid was trickling down to the sides of his mouth and oozing on his neck down to his shirt. John kept gagging and regurgitating the black fluid. I twisted my head to the side as I watched him make strange cooing sounds. I did not understand those but as he tried to life his right arm towards me, I knew that he was asking for help. I shook my head. I thought he was going to bang my head on the floor again, and he dropped his right arm back to where it helplessly lay. Out of curiosity, I scooped some of the thick black fluid from his mouth and tasted it. The taste was a familiar one and although I could not exactly remember where I first tried it, it seemed to taste like how freedom and justice would to the exonerated. John was lying there in front of me, his eyes stirring and moving sideways as if anticipating the reappearance of the creeping women. As his eyes turned towards me, I saw tears coming out of it – tears that reflected the yellow wallpaper behind us and all over us, and I could hear him whisper something. Perhaps, it was my name but since he removed its power a long time ago when we got married, I myself could not even remember it. But I recognized the tears and the whisper. I then touched his left cheek with my right hand. Only then did I notice that it was cold and yellowish like those of the creeping women. John must have become one of their kind. As I caressed his cheek he twisted his head as if to smell my hand but as he twisted it to the left, I thought I heard a deep heavy breath from him and he expired with the whole weight of his head now on my palm. Everything around me suddenly whirled and the endless revolution of the yellow wallpaper. The last thing I could remember was the peculiar smell before I myself passed out. I woke up in bed with a generous breakfast of soup, carrots, cabbage and chicken. I saw Jennie trying to sweep something on the floor. I asked her where John was or what happened. However, before she could even answer, John came from beside my bed and told me “I caught you creeping on the floor earlier when I entered your room. I didn’t expect to find you like that and I was shocked.” John told me he fainted because of this sight and that was all he could remember. When he came around, he told me he felt like he had a bad stomach and his throat was swelling but before he checked them, he helped me first to the bed. I was lying unconscious on the floor beside him. “Tomorrow, we’re moving back to the city and we’ll get the baby from Mary. We will leave this place for good. I don’t know why but it is just not right,” said John. I wanted to ask why but all I could feel was tears from my own eyes. I was happy. Analysis of the Alternate Ending According to Kolodny, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is all about the “protagonist’s progressively debilitating fantasies of entrapment and liberation,” the causes of this issue and its profound effects on the sanity of the female narrator. Obviously, these fantasies of entrapment and liberation resulted from the developing insanity of the narrator in the form of repressed emotions and feelings of discrimination, which were born of a patriarchal society. Repressed emotions were evident in the line, “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word” and the section abruptly ends (Gilman). If there was equality in the marriage of the female narrator and her husband John, there would be no hiding of things or keeping of secrets from each other. Nevertheless, the female narrator lived in a time when women suffered injustice from their husbands, and so they had to keep all sorts of things that would make the men think that these women were slowly gaining their freedom. The diary, which symbolized her own freedom from male domination, was one of these things, and this she kept with care lest she should be caught, punished and ostracized. The repressed emotions that eventually developed in the female narrator as she continued keeping secrets from her husband, as well as the efforts at maintaining their secrecy, may have finally taken a toll on her mental state, thus she was taken by her husband in this mansion for recovery. Moreover, her schizophrenic existence would sometimes make her occasionally think of the goodness of John – “…he is so wise and…he loves me so” (Gilman) – but at the same time she fears him – “I am getting a little afraid of John” (Gilman). This rather inconsistent way of thinking may have taken a toll on her sanity and may have been responsible for making her hallucinate while staring at the yellow wallpaper in her room. Everything may have simply been a case of projection where the female narrator seemed to have objectively seen her situation in the things around him. She may not have realized the bondage she was in but she saw that a woman “began to crawl and shake the pattern [of the yellow wallpaper and so] I got up and ran to help her” (Gilman) and that at night this wallpaper seemed to be behind “bars” (Gilman). What the female narrator did not realize was that it was only simply her own helpless circumstances that she could see on the wallpaper. Nevertheless, there is a need to resolve this. In addition to her repressed feelings, the acts of discrimination that John inflicted upon the female narrator did not do anything to alleviate her worsening mental condition. At the beginning of the story, one can see this particular statement: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (Gilman). This line may be short and simple yet it explains the true plight of women during Gilman’s time in patriarchal America. Women, however, like the one exemplified by the female narrator in the story simply accepted this cultural expectation, and so their anger and self-hatred were repressed and eventually turned into insanity. This particular issue of discrimination must therefore be addressed. The best way to address the issue of repressed emotions of women and their feelings of discrimination from the naturally cruel acts of men in an early 20th century patriarchal American society is to provide a new ending to the story where the triumph of women, or the equality between men and women, is the main goal. Feminism must be the language of this goal. One of the things that feminists believe is that “existing inequalities between dominant and marginalized groups can and should be removed” (McManus). Since John was the source and advocate of inequality in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” then he must be dealt with first. This is the reason why in the alternate ending, the female narrator is shown to be a little bit more aggressive than the role she portrays in the actual story. The fact that she jumps at John and wrestles with him during the first part of this ending somehow symbolizes the breaching of the inequality and injustice that John is making the female narrator feel. Moreover, the fact that the terrifying female figure confronts John and scares him somehow instills in him the idea that women are and should be equal to men, and that being female is simply a “socially/culturally constructed category” (McManus). This means that being female does not necessarily mean that one has to act according to how society has defined the female gender. However, since John may simply not be able to realize this in human terms, then it was somehow necessary that he experienced such epiphany by supernatural means. In believing that the female gender is a mere “socially/culturally constructed category” (McManus), one therefore asserts not the dominance but the strength of women in accepting their roles as coequals of men in a patriarchal society. This female strength or power is represented in the alternate ending as the instance where the female narrator still even “scooped some of the thick black fluid from his mouth and tasted it” while John was helplessly lying on the floor. Although this particular part of the ending may seem so indifferently cruel, it still seeks to show the courage of a woman of having to face up as a strong equal to a man who basically and ironically was lying helpless on the floor. Moreover, the “sticky black liquid coming out of John’s lips” may symbolize the values and virtues of feminism “literally” instilled in him by the terrifying female figure. John regurgitates and gags at this seemingly evil fluid because his patriarchal mental system and culture simply cannot figuratively and literally stomach such radical change through feminist principles. However, while John finds the black fluid disgusting and lethal, the female narrator thinks that it is not only enticing to taste but that “it seemed to taste like how freedom and justice would to the exonerated.” In short, the ending is a rather allegorical representation of the conversion of a man and waking him up to the reality of feminist principles. Nevertheless, since the goal of feminism is the “equally conditioned…gender constructions of…culture,” it simply means that feminism does not promote the dominance or superiority of women, although it was born out of the dominance of man (McManus). Moreover, “feminine power is often perceived to be located in the capacity to both maintain and disrupt loyalties” (Bow). All these mean one thing: that feminists demand equality of gender, not the dominance of the female. This explains, why, in the alternate ending, the female narrator does something remarkable and against the theme of revenge: “[She] ran towards the horrid female figure that was causing John’s regurgitating and gagging sounds and as I shoved her aside.” The female narrator does this as she realizes not necessarily love but pity for the husband who seems to be experiencing torture. She herself does not desire revenge and may have only been overtaken by anger at the beginning of the alternate ending when she wrestled with John. The truth, however, remains that the female narrator is not after her own domination and that perhaps her purpose is simply to instill in John the idea that she too deserves the same respect as he does. Moreover, all feminism wants may simply perhaps be the peace and unity in one’s family, such as the one experienced by the narrator at the end of the alternate ending. In that part, John seems to have miraculously transformed into a man who recognized the female narrator’s need, especially her need for freedom. Top of Form Bottom of Form Works Cited Bow, Leslie. “Introduction: Theorizing Gendered Constructions of Ethnic and National Collectivity.” Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature. 1998. Princeton University Press. 27 Mar 2012. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 2009. The College of Staten Island. 27 Mar 2012. Kolodny, Annette. “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts.” New Literary History 11 (3):451-467 (Spring 1980). Johns Hopkins University Press. 2012. Web. 27 Mar 2012. McManus, Barbara F. “Characteristics of a Feminist Approach.” 1998. The College of New Rochelle. 27 Mar 2012. Read More