The Yellow Wallpaper -- essays research papers

"The chicken wallpaper", A Descent Into follyIn the nineteenth century, women in literature were often portrayed as submissive to men. Literature of the period often characterized women as oppressed by society, as well as by the male influences in their lives. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the tragic story of a womans descent into low and madness because of this oppression.The narrators declining mental health is reflected through the characteristics of the mansion she is trapped in and her husband, while trying to protect her, is actually destroying her. The narrator of the story goes with her remedy/husband to stay in a colonial mansion for the summer. The kinsperson is supposed to be a place where she can recover from collapse postpartum depression. According to Jennifer Fleissner, "naturalist characters like the narrator of Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper" is shown obsessed with the details of an entrapping interior ity. In such an example we see naturalisms clearest rewrite of previous understandings of gender its refiguration of domestic plazas, and hence, domestic identity according to the autobiography of repetitive work and compulsion that had once served to distinguish public vitality from a sentimentary understood home" Fleissner 59."The Yellow Wallpaper" is a fictionalized deem of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans own postpartum depression. Gilman was a social critic and feminist who wrote prolifically just about the necessity of social and agitateual equality, particularly about womens need for stinting independence. According to critic Valarie Gill, "Gilman attached the nineteenth centurys configuration of private space as womans domain and its attendant generalizations about femininity. Gilman seeks to blur the distinction amid private and public life. Gilman unflaggingly urged her audience to consider their logic in duty assignment women to the home. The composition of home life altered radically between the start out and final decades of the nineteenth century" (17).The narrator loves her baby, but knows she is not fitted to take care of him. "It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. such a deer baby And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me dying(p)" (Gilman 359). The symbolism utilized by Gilman is somewhat askew from the conventional. A house us... ...ver been written to show why so many woman go crazy, especially farmers wives, who live lonely, monotonous lives. A husband of the kind describe that he could not account for his wifes having gone insane &8211 for, utter he, "to my certain knowledge she has hardly left her kitchen and bedroom in 30 years" (60). connoisseur Sharon Felton says, "Even if we should remove every legal and governmental discrimination against women heretofore if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex so long as their universal parentage is private housekeepi ng they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic stain labor and economically a non productive, dependent class . The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few" (273). Critic Sharon Felton "Even if we should remove every legal and political discrimination against women even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic hand labor and economically a non productive, dependent class &8230.The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few."(273)