Marxism In The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman weaves into her story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” the lineage of the subjugation of women inherited via the slow, relentless process of disenfranchisement and marital subjugation, and delivered by the hidden hand of paternalism. The narrator experiences her life much as a nesting doll, immobile: a mind trapped in a woman, a woman trapped in a marriage room, womankind trapped by the institutions which they have no power to control, yet are complicit in maintaining. Engels, in “The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State”, outlines the historical trajectory of the oppression of women, and conceives of monogamy, and the institution of marriage as the personification of autocracy, it having gained its dominion …show more content…
The great teeming masses of “normal people” include, and selectively exclude women. Here we see the deep roots of feminist intersectionality in Marxist theory. De Beauvoir expounds this, highlighting the fact that while the proletariat has been able to identify as a group, to effectively organize, women are sent off one by one to reside in the home of their keeper. As such a woman, the heroine of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is shepherded off, away from the solace of feminine empathy, marriage the doorless tower she built for herself. De Beauvoir contends that women have not been extended the back-handed courtesy of being “herded together”. It is not merely a division by class, but the division of the entirety of humanity by gender, which is the ancestor of and permeates all discussions of class and power; without the understanding that women are the primordial other, a complete understanding of the imbalance of power is …show more content…
For that matter, why should any woman feel obliged to trod along a predetermined path, stifling in its presumed normalcy? While a reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” places the mental status of the woman on a silver platter for dissection, it’s interesting to suppose that the rules of sanity are as superfluous here as any in a work of art, as in the feminine mind. John’s reaction to his wife’s mental state is akin to the reaction towards all things feminine in a culture that devalues them. He refers to her “imaginative power” as “weakness” instead of as a vehicle for enlightenment and self-fulfillment; her autonomy and power is a threat to his existence, as women’s liberation is a threat to the existence of the state as maintained through the machinations of patriarchy. He requires her to control herself, to maintain the internalization of her oppression. The wallpaper, her living, breathing self-loathing, needs to be destroyed. The figure inside the pattern, the tortured soul beneath is herself; the unrepentantly filthy, yellow-sulphurous, desirous and non-conforming self that can only be repressed for so long. She will no longer deny the existence of her femininity- faith, flight, moonlight, and the unquantifiable sense of patterns in the ether. She will crawl over him, lunatic,