Gilmans Arguments Arise Again - Research Paper Example

 Gilman’s Arguments Arise Again Throughout a large portion of history, women have been constrained within very narrow boundaries within society with few options but to follow through with expectations. This was because women who defied these constraints by taking jobs outside the home or refusing to take a husband without dedicating themselves to God were considered to be evil or unnatural (Welter, 1966). Whether they had a choice in their condition or not, these women were usually not able to make enough money to support themselves and had few legal options to protect themselves. Most people believed in the concept established by the Bible and the Church that women had been divinely placed under the total protection of men. This would include her livelihood, shelter, food and comfort. In many cases, women were legally prevented from owning property, negotiate their own contracts or even keep any of their own wages. ‘Scientific’ knowledge of the time also held that women were not the intellectual equals of men and were simply not capable enough to consider all the consequences involved in managing business or politics. There were, of course, some notable exceptions to the rule, but most women were incapable of proving their intelligence thanks to a general failure on the part of parents and society to provide them with formal schooling to develop their natural skills (Comptons, 1995). Women who had the benefit of fathers who valued education for their daughters proved the argument that the problem was not inherently a question of female ability but rather one of social conditioning, yet it wasn’t until the late 1800s that these ideas began to take hold. What Charlotte Perkins Gilman reveals of society in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be contrasted with the conditions revealed in Sylvia Plath’s story in The Bell Jar, written approximately 50 years later following the ‘sexual revolution,’ to discover what elements of female life had changed and what has remained the same. A great deal of what Gilman argues in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that women have been forced to place too much importance on their ability or inability to maintain a proper household as in keeping a husband’s interest and caring for her children while considering this to be enough (Akers, 1980). This is not necessarily her fault as a result of personal choices generated from within, selfishness or laziness, but rather as the result of generations of an artificial convention that forces women to use their gender attractiveness to fulfill her expected place in society as well as her only means of providing for her own welfare and the welfare of her children now and into the future. Because she was unable to work for herself to achieve any degree of comfort or success, marriage to a successful man was her only option to a satisfying life. “Where both sexes obtain their food through the same exertions, from the same sources, under the same conditions, both sexes are acted upon alike, and developed alike by their environment. Where the two sexes obtain their food under different conditions, and where that difference consists in one of them being fed by the other, then the feeding sex becomes the environment of the fed. Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment” (Gilman, 1898, Ch. 2). The character in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” likely suffering from post-partum depression, must rely on other women to care for her child and her house at the same time that she wants nothing more than to be engaged in her own form of occupation. However, she is permitted to do none of these things and thus loses her sense of purpose and place. The woman in the story seems to be normal enough at the beginning of the story to recognize that something is wrong. She disagrees with the diagnosis of her husband (who is conveniently also her doctor) regarding her course of treatment. They feel she should be given plenty of rest and isolation: “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?” (Gilman, 1899). Women were at the mercy of their men whether they agreed or not so she had to behave as her husband dictated (Roberts, 2002). Because of an inability to follow her own instincts regarding her condition, this woman completely loses her mind as well as her family by the end of the novel. This insanity happens in stages as she begins to recognize faces and figures of other women trapped within the ugly pattern of the old yellow wallpaper. The imagery of this wallpaper begins to take on a life of its own both in the mind of the woman and in the mind of the reader. Through the course of the story, the woman transforms from an individual who adores the outside and green growing things to the artificial world created by man. This wallpaper plays a large role in the progression of the woman’s illness as she begins to see women creeping around inside it, trying to escape the oppression they, too, have experienced. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman, 1899). The entrapping imagery of this wallpaper is oppressive as the story is read, creating a sense of the smothering effect it must have had on a person living in its shade. Because she, too, cannot escape from the confining room in which she has been housed, the woman becomes completely insane, creeping around the walls after peeling the wallpaper off as high as she can reach. She has so lost her sense of self and identity that she is seen even creeping over the body of her husband, who has fainted against the wall, in order to continue her progress unimpeded. At this point, she no longer recognizes that there is something wrong with her actions. Although it might be expected that many of these issues would have changed in the 50 years that intervened between Gilman’s writings and Sylvia Plath’s writing of The Bell Jar, many of the same preoccupations of life can be discerned in Plath’s protagonist. Esther Greenwood is the protagonist of the story. She is greatly different from Gilman’s character in that she has a name and she has a chance at both an education and a career. At the opening of the story, she is a college student who has just been awarded a coveted guest editor position at a New York magazine. “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car” (Plath, Ch. 1). From the beginning, Esther is represented as what might be called a rising star. This is because, even though she’s a woman, she has escaped the lower-middle-class lifestyle of her home and entered the high society world of New York without needing to depend on the support of a man at any point of her process. Female characters arrange for her needs in the city as well as her welfare at home or at college, she lives in a female dorm and she is provided for by a female benefactor. These exterior details of her life would suggest that the world had undergone a near complete reversal in attitude from what it had been in Gilman’s time. However, Esther has a difficult time finding her place within this society because it doesn’t match any of the typical roles women were expected to play. She seems overwhelmed by the daily news and her primary goal in life is to attract a handsome man, or any man, who will be there to provide for her. This internal aspect of her character is shown through her clumsy advances toward Constantin, the UN interpreter, and in the disastrous ending to her date with Marco. Although she has had a boyfriend in college, Buddy, she is not particularly attracted to him and the new attitude toward women encourages her to feel she should be able to find both the required man she needs for support and the personal satisfaction of a good relationship. The first man she actually does sleep with seems incapable of the kind of devotion expected by women since before Gilman’s time, presenting again a woman incapable of meeting the traditional expectations of her society. Esther’s entire sense of identity seems bound up within her ability to understand and attract a mate, just as Gilman’s character’s entire sense of identity becomes locked up within the expectations of her society. “When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line” (Plath, Ch. 7). Esther expects that losing her virginity will be the magic pill that suddenly transforms her from being the shy and awkward teenager from college into the confident and successful businesswoman she sees in Jay Cee. When this doesn’t happen for her, she descends into a madness that almost destroys her that is very similar to Gilman’s narrator’s madness of constraint. Because Plath’s novel is mostly autobiographical, it can be assumed that many of the primary issues faced by Esther were once faced by Plath and thus remained important issues to contend with within the scope of female existence at the time. Although the external expectations of women had changed since Gilman, allowing women to gain high levels of education and to find positions within the professional working world, not enough had yet changed to allow women, still raised within the traditional mindset of the past, to escape these bonds on an internal level. The vast difference between intellectual and emotional understanding thus leads to the breakdown of Plath’s protagonist and suggests the titanic struggle faced by many women living during these trying times of transition. Works Cited Akers, Charles. Abigail Adams: An American Woman. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1980. Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia. “Women’s History in America.” (1995). Women’s International Center. March 20, 2010 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. Small, Maynard & Company, 1898. (March 6, 2010) < http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/cpgilman/bl-cpgilman-womeneco-preface.htm> Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Boston: Small & Maynard, 1899. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000. Roberts, Mary Louise. “True Woman Revisited.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1. Spring 2002, pp. 150-55. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1. 1966, pp. 151-74. Read More