Professor Willard
English 102
27 November 2017
Suppression of Women in The Yellow Wallpaper
Women were stereotypic throughout western cultures. At most, they were considered fragile and contemptible. Women were to maintain the home and avert from intellectual thinking. In the Victorian period (1837-1901) aside from women's suffragette movements the women were seen more than less a possession rather an individual and recognized as a feminist indictment in a male presiding society (Korb). However, during the 18th and 19th century, women educated the public of oppression that was faced by the women society to uplift discrimination.
In her story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolizes a repressive society …show more content…
Developing a nervous depression (Neurasthenia) after birth, their physician, prescribed the “rest” treatment to overcome depression. Rest (to relax, sleep, or refrain from taking part in work or an activity), however, involved elimination of stimuli, interaction with people, reading, writing, and even see her own child. After being placed in an upper room in the house she starts imagining things in the wallpaper that she found maddening (Stone). However, as the story proceeds, it is unyielding to tell if the women's imagination is getting to her or if she is slowly deteriorating into madness, as she hallucinates people in the wallpaper, “and she is all the time trying to climb through,” (Gilman 45) and adopts a protective nature within her imagination. As time passes, she becomes paranoid and progressively interested in the patterning of the yellow wallpaper “It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups but old foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman 76). The narrator comes to believe that there is a woman behind the pattern – a woman wanting to escape. She begins to hallucinate habitually as she perceives the first woman as a crouching shadow, then a woman trying to escape; definite that the women gets out and creeps around her. As the summer is coming to an end, she feels …show more content…
There are many ways to depict Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” for numerous controversial meanings. Women were stereotypic and were seen more or less a possession rather an individual and recognized as a feminist indictment in a male dominant society. Throughout the story, she is treated as a child by her husband John, which is apparent to the fact that John saw her as inferior in terms of social and gender roles. She’s submissive to her husband and faces side-effects of oppression and subordination The Yellow Wallpaper expands beyond the story itself and constructs a dispute or debate about what was really portrayed