Analysis of the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman - Essay Example

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman The "Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman is a short story that is written according to a feminist point of view. The story is characterized by oppression of women in the 1800s but also an illumination of the ills faced by women in a patriarchal society today. The short story follows the real life of Charlotte Gilman and the hardship she endured under the control of his husband. The cultural context of this society is male-dominated where the man takes exclusive decisions and given the woman no rights to exercise. This is the fate which Charlotte Gilman lives in. her husband is very oppressive of her and being a physician, uses undue influence on her in order to express and have his will done. Despite her suffering from the depression and her need for help, she does not get the help she needs from neither her husband nor her brother. Her husband prescribes her a complete bed rest as the sure for her depression. He holds that she is sick as long as she wants to. This explains the fact that the husband does not believe that his wife is sick and therefore, prescribes her the bed rest in order to get her stay in a locked room. She spends her summer vacation alone in a room on the respectable that this is supposed to make her recover easily. Her room is located at the top of the house and she can clearly see the whole world moving on while she is stuck alone in a place she has no control over. Furthermore, she suffers the same fate on the hands of her own brother after he fails to rescue her from the torments of being ;left alone in a room while she was sick. Her brother takes the side of her husband and agrees to have her prescribed the bed rest so that she can feel better. This leaves her hopeless as she has no one else to help her. She spends the whole summer vacation staring at the yellow wallpaper on the walls on her room, “Indeed, the woman is trapped not only in a room, not only in a prescriptive cure, but clearly in a more complex world of male discourse and diagnosis” (Kautz 3). In this society, it is evident that the male dictate their superiority to their females and it is their women’s roe to obey them without a word. This society is male-dominated to the extreme. This can be evidenced by the respect and obedience demonstrated by Charlotte Gilman under his husband, John. Charlotte Gilman is given express orders by her husband to stay in bed and suppress her own imagination while she is alone so that she would get better. He says to her, “Bless her little heart” her husband assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with her but temporary nervous depression. He confirms, “she will be as sick as she pleases” She feels well already and she knows she does not need the bed rest but then she does not say a word about it. She feels better and she already knows that what would make her feel better is to go out and experience the world as other people. Instead, she agrees with what her husband and her brother tell her without having to tell them what she thinks. She admits: “"Personally I disagree with their ideas … Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?" (160). this shows her lack of confidence and self-worth while in the company of the male. Throughout the story, she makes remarks which show that her husband is the mighty one and she is not good enough. This shows that although the men are dominating and oppressing the female, the female give them the motivation to do so because of the persistent submission even when they know the male are wrong and they are right. It is also sad to see the women losing their self-confidence. This can be shown by several instances where Charlotte Gilman says, "I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and her I am a comparative burden already" (162). She also says that she has no other options than to obey as, "What is one to do?" (161). There is a very big role played by the practice of medicine in the "Yellow Wallpaper". Medicinal knowledge is preserved as the specialty of the men which they use to dominate their women and to get them to obey their every wish. According to Poirier “The combination of honest medical ignorance coupled with cultural biases served to give women little latitude in their individual needs and even less voice in assessing the health care they received”(2). First, it serves to extend the importance and facilitation of male superiority over women. This is because women will not disobey their doctors and therefore, this symbolizes the quest of men to perpetuate their oppression and control over their women. Furthermore, medicine can be seen as a tool with which Charlotte Gilman overcomes her depression and reasons about how to get through her own bondage. The room she was kept in as prescribed by her husband enables her to unwind and interpret the many patterns in the yellow wallpaper which helps her to figure out how the woman in the wall paper climbs out of the wall paper. medicine is viewed as a way in which men use their will on women in this society. Kautz holds that, “It comes as no surprise that 23 years later in the creation of her novel Herland, 1915, Gilman pointedly excludes physicians from her female utopia. Without doctors in Herland, there is no sickness”(4). The yellow wallpaper is symbolic of the cultural oppression of women in the society during the 1800s. Charlotte Gilman examines the wallpaper and sees a woman behind the wallpaper who is struggling to break through. This is symbolic of the oppression of women in this society whoa are tired of being under the control of the male and to be able to exercise their freedom. The woman in the wallpaper is struggling every day to climb through the wallpaper but she is unable to do so because she is strangled by the patterns in the wallpaper. She observes, "and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so" (667). This is hope for Charlotte Gilman that even if women are suppressed by men and all their efforts strangled to prevent them from rising up and being free, there is consolation knowing that there are many women out there who are struggling through the same things and on day the woman in the wall paper will be able to climb through the pattern-it strangle and be free. And that same way, the women in this society will be free from suppression. As feminist story, "Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman presents the struggle of women to fight the suppression of their freedom by the male. By being locked up as prescription to remain in the room the whole day all of summer vacation, this is suppression of one’s rights and efforts to be free which only confines one into a limited space both physically and mentally. Although Charlotte Gilman presents the limitation of space in this scene, there is no doubt that the scene helps the woman to recollect all her confidence and realize she is not alone in the struggling path to freedom. Although the mind is free to reason and hope for the dawn freedom, the spirit and the social has to be suppressed so as to be able to live in peace in such a society. Every day she stays in that room makes more women coming from the wallpaper. She is convinced that there are many women who want their freedom but are not able to prevail over the male will in the society, therefore, their spirits and should remain suppressed in their subconscious. When she sees the many number of woman trying to climb from the wallpaper each day more and more, she wonders, "wonder if they all came out of the wallpaper" (668). She already considers herself as through she already crept out of the wall paper only that her spirit is being suppressed such that she is unable to speak out before her husband or her brother. Women in this society are not give access to the education given to their male counterparts. The women’s role is duty to her husband. The beings by setting Gilman as the traditional woman whose roles are limited to the kitchen and the duty to the husband and her children. The illusion painted is that of a simple, woman without he will or the ability to unchain herself from the dungeons of suppression. In the beginning of the story, we are welcomed to the description she makes about her garden she uses such terms as ‘delicious’. This is used to show how much she is attached to the homely aspects and the kitchen which are the designated roles of woman. However, the woman starts to unchain herself from the wallpaper and rises. Although she agrees to her treatment prescribed by her husband, she gets the power to use her won imagination to overcome to suppression. She is however able to overcome her suppression by emerging from the conformist ways which made her tied to her husband’s control. She says “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back”. This is consistent with the feminist theme which advocates for the ability of the female to fight for her rights and recover from the suppression from the male-dominated society. As demonstrated here, Gilman manages to relieve herself from the trap she has been contained in by her husband and her brother and becomes strong enough to speak her mind by herself by expressing how she truly feels without fearing the male. These results in the demonstration of a female hero in this story who manages to win the pressure and the prejudice of men. Her triumph from the suppression of her husband changes the position of his husband who becomes insane. The fact that Gilman did not go insane when she was locked up in theta room shows that women have become very strong. This is because she is able to get her voice heard but as for her husband, he gets defeated as he faints. By fainting, he declares his defeat and further, he loses his sanity. In her book, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?" Gilman explains that his book was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked. She says, “Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad”(45). To her, the yellow wallpaper serves as symbol of the oppression to a woman who feels trapped in her roles as wife and mother. According to Ammons, “At best, woman was counted little more than man’s toy among the upper classes, and his beast of burden among the lower social elements. In some countries even denied a soul, in none was she supposed to have any particular mental power, nor any need for its development”(56). Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York. Oxford University Press.1991. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X Day, Robert Funk, Linda Coleman. 10th Ed. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2014 238-249 Evans, Deborah. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Overview. Feminist Writers. Ed. Pamela Kester- Shelton. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014 Ford, Karen. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Women’s Discourse. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2 (1985): 309-314. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 182. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. Golden, Catherine. The Writing of The Yellow Wallpaper: A Double Palimpsest. Studies in American Fiction 17.2 (Autumn 1989): 193-201. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 201. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilmans "The Yellow Wall-Paper": A Sourcebook and Critical Edition. Ed. Catherine J. Golden. New York: Routledge, 2004. 45-47. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 201. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wallpaper. Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Janet Witalec. The Yellow Wallpaper. Short Story Criticism. Vol. 62. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. Jane F. Thrailkill. Doctoring ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. ELH 69.2 (2002): 525-566. Project MUSE. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. Korb, Rena. An overview of The Yellow Wallpaper. Gale Online Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. Kautz, Elizabeth Dolan. Gynecologists, Power And Sexuality In Modernist Texts. Journal Of Popular Culture 28.4 (1995): 81-91. SocINDEX with Full Text. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. Poirier, Suzanne. The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctor And Patients. Womens Studies 10.1 (1983): 15. SocINDEX with Full Text. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. Read More