Feminism in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Women have come a long way since the nineteenth century; they are able to live independent lives, hold high-paying jobs, and even attend college. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the author depicts a middle class woman controlled by the ideas of the nineteenth century domestic values. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman was unaware at the time she wrote this short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is now considered one of the first feminist pieces of literature written (Crowder para 1). The narrator is forced to live in a house in which she feels very uncomfortable; the wallpaper is hideous and seems to change throughout the day. The narrator’s husband, a physician, says that she is very sick and just needs to sleep, rather than worry about the wallpaper. The wallpaper is actually a direct reflection of how the narrator feels throughout the short story. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author depicts a woman who is imprisoned by her husband and the values of the time, rather than a woman with an illness.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is prescribed by her husband and brother, both physicians, to rest in a Victorian home in the country order to get well. Her husband, John, feels that she is helpless and very ill, just as many doctors of the time thought of women with nervous conditions in the nineteenth century (Crowder para 2). John is very controlling over the narrator, forbidding her to read, write, or leave the house. The story is written in a journal form, and he narrator says, “There comes John, and I must put this away, -- he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 1427). This shows just how controlling John is over the narrator’s actions. The narrator must write in secret in order to avoid being punished by her husband. This contributes greatly to the narrator’s psychological downfall. The narrator vocalizes that she does not like the wallpaper in the room that she is living in, but her husband refuses to change the paper because “he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (Gilman 1428). The narrator hates the wallpaper and begins to study it more and more throughout the days.
The narrator begins to realize that the paper’s background is in the shape of a woman. The woman is consistently seen in the paper, whether it is day or night. It seems that this woman is symbolic to the story: “his woman-figure becomes essentially the narrator’s ‘doppelganger,’ or double, trapped behind the bars of her role in the patriarchy” (Crowder para 5). The narrator sees this woman that is trapped in the wallpaper each day, just as the narrator is trapped in the house under her husband’s control. The foreground of the wallpaper changes with the time of day; at night there are bars, and during the day there are horrible flowing patterns. The narrator says that the woman in the paper is trapped and “creeps” around behind the paper, shaking the bars at night.
The bars, which the narrator sees the woman in the wallpaper behind, are symbolic to the story’s underlying meaning. At the beginning of the story, the woman seems mentally sound, writing cohesively and merely trusting her husband’s judgment on why she is in the house. It may even be assumed that the narrator is not even ill at all. However, as she begins to notice the patterns in the wallpaper, she begins to feel trapped and suffocated by her surroundings. She cannot sleep at night, eat breakfast, or be honest with her husband. Her existence is consumed with this woman who is “trapped” in the wallpaper, just as the narrator is trapped in the house under her husband’s control.
During the time that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written, men were seen as the more dominant gender, and women generally respected their husband’s orders. However, as depicted by Gilman’s short story, women were not happy to do so. In fact, obeying John’s orders caused the narrator to feel entrapped in a home in which she had no control. The woman in the wallpaper was her mirror image: a woman with no control of her situation and desperate to get out. The narrator was not sick at all when the story began, but by the end, she was engulfed in a nervous disorder, causing her to “creep” around, just as the woman in the wallpaper did. The narrator was a victim to her husband’s hand and the values that women held during the nineteenth century. With the freedom women have today, perhaps she would have been able to get out of the house that made her insane. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a true eye-opener for how far feminism has come since the nineteenth century.
Works Cited
Crowder, Sarah L. “Feminist Gothic in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’”
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Upper Saddle River: PH, 2001. Pp 1425-1439.
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