The Yellow Wallpaper as a Feminist Text - Essay Example

Deposing the Patriarch The Yellow Wall-Paper is an unforgettable narrative by an author who, existing at a period that greatly limits women’s opportunities, was attempting to challenge these barriers through painstaking criticism of the male-dominated society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman produced several poems, novels, and short stories focusing on the status and role of women in the public and private sphere, particularly, as an individual, mother, and wife. However, even though the themes of all her writings are analytical and very provocative for the period, not rewarding Gilman with significant acclaim, The Yellow Wall-Paper is unique, more powerful, and it brings together her different arguments and perspectives on how the system damages and smothers women’s wisdom, judgment, and creativity. Charlotte exposes a great deal about her experiences, her emotions, and her struggle against psychological sickness. Her denouncement of patriarchy is intense and her resentment of it lingers. Women being pushed into submissiveness, being disallowed to perfect their abilities, being suppressed intellectually, and being limited to domestic roles such as housekeeping and child rearing can easily get depressed. To remedy her depression and anxiety she was instructed by her physician, Dr. Mitchell, to “live as domestic a life as possible” (Gilman 46) and “never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live” (Gilman 46), which apparently from the point of view of the contemporary period can be viewed as a way of making sure women stick to their domestic roles and remain in their inferior position. She afterward “went home, followed these directions rigidly for some months, and came perilously near to losing my mind” (Gilman 47). Charlotte thought of a single solution to her dilemma, that is, to abandon the restraining domestic life and find her true calling. After leaving her family she created The Yellow Wall-Paper and kept on writing as the most effective way of keeping her sanity and creativity. The Yellow Wall-Paper says much about women and American culture at the turn of the century. The female characters in the story are passive and willing victims of patriarchy. Jennie, the sister of John, embodies the stereotypical woman, a woman who is contented and pleased with her submissive and domesticated role. Jennie is “a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession” (Gilman 54), and takes care of the household chores while the narrator rests all day. She agrees to John’s diagnosis of the narrator’s sickness. In essence, Jennie represents a woman who is overwhelmed by the ‘maleness’ of society and does not dare to challenge patriarchy due to fear of being punished. Similarly, the narrator is an embodiment of a meek, obedient housewife. However, what makes Jennie and the narrator different is their way of coping with a patriarchal culture. Jennie chooses silence while the narrator decides to defy male dominance through imagination and intellect. So what does it say about women and American culture? First, that not all women are the same. There are those who choose to stick to traditions, and there are those who choose to go against the norms. American culture, obviously, is patriarchal. By transforming two visual representations—the flower drapery and the color yellow—into the core symbol of her narrative on women’s cultural and social oppression, Charlotte was envisioning her rising feminist resistance to the ‘pointless pattern’ (Gilman 19) of patriarchal culture and perspective, putting these together with feminist standpoint and politics, the core female theme of her narrative. Similar to numerous feminists of her period, Charlotte interpreted corruption not as rebellion, but simply as another articulation of patriarchy. If, symbolically, the yellow paper signifies the male-centered makeup of the patriarchal society, it quite precisely reveals modern patriarchal art and patriarchal consumer society. Interior designer, artist, husband, and physician come together to hem in the female storyteller in prison of patriarchy, a ‘delirium tremens’ of male passion, its “sprawling outlines run[ning] off in great slanting waves of optic horror” (Gilman 20), and bearing down on the female narrator “like a bad dream”. As Charlotte stated in her later work The Man-Made World (1911), “Our androcentric culture is… a masculine culture in excess, and therefore undesirable” (Gardner 14). In The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte explained that such “excess of degeneracy” (Gardner 14-15) also poses risks to one’s health. However, the narrator did not allow her husband’s patronizing and dominant attitude to completely overwhelm her; she fought it. Ironically, the yellow wallpaper itself, one of the instruments used by her husband to restrain her, was the most powerful weapon she used to fight the male-dominated forces within their family. Its appearance and the patterns etched in it disgust the narrator, but what bother her are the human shapes she sees in it (Gilman 16): There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. […] Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where the two brea[d]ths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line […]. This paper looks to me as if it knew what vicious influence it had!” These hallucinations of her were the outcome of being trapped in the house all day, forced by her ‘loving’ and ‘caring’ husbands. But eventually, these hallucinations also bothered the husband and his sister Jennie, even to the point of examining closely the wallpaper themselves. But they were not able to find those that kept the narrator amused and preoccupied all day. In this way, she was able to weaken the very foundation of patriarchy—the claim that she was falling into mental illness. She was able to take her husband into her world, and, finally, to defeat him by ‘creeping over him every time’. Works Cited Gardner, Catherine. The A to Z of Feminist Philosophy. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper. New York: Feminist Press, 1996. Print. Read More