Preview

The Yellow Wallpaper Patriarchal Oppression

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
431 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Yellow Wallpaper Patriarchal Oppression
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman uses the narrator’s social status of a woman and her husbands patriarchal oppression to show how, people who control others deprive them from self expression.
In the story the narrator was patriarchally oppressed by her husbands over controlling power. His words were very authoritative that he would have the last word in anything. He even was the one that determined whether his wife felt sick or not. She proclaimed, “He does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (565). She had no voice or say because of her social status and it didn't matter if she was suffering from illness or pain. Because of the husband's power to control, the woman was restricted from her personal opinions and thoughts. She was only commanded to obey all her husband's orders, with pleasure. …show more content…
With the deprivation and the oppression, his wife obtained a mental illness. Through the husbands authority and governance he gave the order for her to be stationed in the nursery from the new home, which was not a pleasant room to stay in. As she describes, “ The paint and paper…are stripped off...in great patches...I never saw a worse paper in my life” (566). Although the room was in harsh conditions, she was given that room by her husbands commands and all she had to do was obey and deal with where she was placed. Through her husband's oppression she was not able to express herself . She could have simply told him that she detested having that room as her living space, when in the first place there was other rooms to sleep in, yet because she was a woman the only thing that was at her favor was to abide to her husband's
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    THe Yellow Wallpaper & A Jury of Her Peers
    • 1211 Words
    • 5 Pages

    THe Yellow Wallpaper & A Jury of Her Peers

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a couple had moved into a house to relieve her sickness that her husband had diagnosed. The woman is not named because it is directed to all women and not just one. Her husband is a physician and in the story she praises him dearly. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It shows that she speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so fixed in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will…

    • 1211 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.
    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.

    In the summer of 1855 a mentally ill woman moves into a secluded estate with her husband. She immediately voices her concerns about the eerie feeling she gets in the house and how much she hates the yellow wallpaper, but like always, her husband disregards her concerns and insists that he knows best because he is a doctor. She also believes that she was born to be a writer, but her husband forbids her from writing or communicating with other people and insists that she stay in bed to rest. Much like a prisoner in solitary confinement, the narrator starts to lose her mind. She begins to fixate her entire life on the wallpaper while she spends her days in bed. She started keeping a journal which he hid from her family, and in it, she writes about how she ‘discovered’ a creeping woman trapped behind the pattern. She centers her life on freeing this woman by locking the door and attempting to tear off all of the wallpaper. When her husband comes home from work, he breaks down the door, sees the mess, and faints. Then the woman crawls out of the room and the story seems to be over, but there has got to be more. This woman is not simply your Martha Stewart of the 1800s that doesn’t like her bedroom wallpaper. The job of the reader is to break down the roles of each character, analyze the major symbols, evaluate the theme and use them like the pieces of a puzzle to understand what the author, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was trying to say.…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Bread Givers
    • 1148 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Bread Givers

    The mother of the house is Shena Smolinsky. For a long time she had to put up with her husband’s beliefs. She really does not like how he just studies the bibles all day, preaches to the family, does not work, and makes her and their children go out for the work. All the wages made go straight to the father. Shena Smolinsky also treats her husband like gold, and that is the way he likes it. At the dinner table, with already not very much food, she gives her husband all at fat. The women suffer the most because they are the house that cook, clean, and work. A scene from the book Bread Givers where she tells her girls the story of her life back home and how good it was. And how she thought she really fell in love with their father, and how he doesn’t understand the true meaning of marriage.…

    • 1148 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    A Rose for Emily & the Yellow Wallpaper Essay Example
    • 5208 Words
    • 21 Pages

    A Rose for Emily & the Yellow Wallpaper Essay Example

    The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” struggles throughout the story due to her controlling husband and a woman’s role in society during this time. Her husband John is a physician and it is clear they are upper-middle class as they are able to afford a summer house and have help to cater to their needs. Even if the main character was not suffering from what her husband calls a nervous disorder, her main function would be to maintain a household and raise her children. Since she is deemed unable to do that due to her condition, she ends up being somewhat useless. In addition, during this time period, nervous disorders and similar mental illnesses were virtually unknown conditions. For these types of conditions, doctors often prescribed a ‘rest-cure’ method in order to ‘cure’ the ill woman. The rest-cure method required physical and creative inactivity and virtual isolation from society and the outside world. Since her husband is a ‘brilliant’ doctor who continuously tells her she is sick, the narrator complies with his every instruction and end up completely dominated by her husband. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” (Gilman, 1899, p.2) This story touches on several aspects of a woman’s struggle with society. There is the struggle against being an independent woman in society, a woman’s oppression within her own marriage, and how a woman is treated when suffering from a mental illness such as depression.…

    • 5208 Words
    • 21 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The First Entry of the Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The First Entry of the Yellow Wallpaper

    At first, we can see the narrator repeats the name of her husband John often in phrases such as ‘Ordinary people like John and me’, ‘John laughs at me’ ‘John is practical in the extreme’ etc. This repetition shows the reader the narrator’s dependency on her husband – it seems as if her husband is all that controls her life and all that she thinks about. John seems to have such a powerful influence on her life that she almost can’t function without him mentally and physically; Physically because he is a ‘physician’ and is caring for her while she’s in her unstable state, and mentally because of both her unstable state and her submissive nature towards him. During the time in which The Yellow Wallpaper was written, males constantly had power and control over women and were seen as the more dominant of the two; the effect of her husband’s name repeated reflects this attitude and how unstable women are viewed without their husbands.…

    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Seeing Oppression in Gilman’s “the Yellow Wallpaper”
    • 1306 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Seeing Oppression in Gilman’s “the Yellow Wallpaper”

    The attitude towards women’s health by doctors and physicians has changed greatly over time. Women aren’t looked down upon by male doctors anymore, nor are these women dismissed as crazy or simply stressed when they believe they don’t feel well, seeking medical help. However, women in the past—specifically during the nineteenth century and before that—weren’t so fortunate. Oppression against women was great at that time; a woman receiving the same treatment as men was practically crazy, especially when women were supposed to be submissive, meek, and kind housewives to their men. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a turn of the century short story, an unnamed woman, suffering from what’s presumed to be postpartum depression, is prescribed the “rest cure” by her physician husband. They reside in a rental home for the summer, and the woman is isolated in a locked upstairs room to recover. From that point on, the readers watch as the woman slowly loses her mind under the influence of the rest cure. By writing the story from the first person point of view, the reader catches a large glimpse of the effects of the nineteenth century’s oppression by physicians against women.…

    • 1306 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Summary Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1386 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Summary Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

    Throughout her confinement to the yellow nursery, the narrator began to realize how wrong her perception of her husband John was. She initially thought that John was helping her treat her depression. However, she now understood that her husband was neglecting her in the room, and only created the impression of helping her, while in reality, he is doing nothing. Gilman writes, “He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him” (25). The narrator reveals her husband to be hypocritical, pretending to be a husband while actually leaving her alone. This makes him seem selfish and disrespectful towards his wife. As a husband, he should have made his wife feel as comfortable as possible during her supposed “treatment.” Instead, he treats her as a confused person with little worth. This action makes him look more like a prison guard instead of a caring husband. The narrator, however, was finally able to see through her husband’s deceptions. By saying that “As if I couldn’t see through him,” she understood that her husband is not treating her as she is supposed to. According to traditional gender expectations, a wife is supposed to follow everything her husband’s orders,…

    • 1386 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Oppression In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1519 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Oppression In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

    At first glance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper may seem to be a fairly simplistic text, which outlines a woman’s struggles with postpartum depression; however, with greater investigation, it can be determined that a deeper meaning is present. The Yellow Wall-Paper, with further analysis, can be interpreted as having a meaningful message, as the oppression of women is profiled. This message is gradually exposed along with the development of the characters, namely the narrator and her husband John, throughout the text. As the narrator experiences visions of women trapped in her walls, is forced to conform to specific gender roles, and is unable to express or communicate her own feelings, the impact which oppression has on the individual, as well as the idea of patriarchal society, is demonstrated.…

    • 1519 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper Character Assessment
    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Yellow Wallpaper Character Assessment

    He has prescribed that she should stay isolated in their rented summer home in an upstairs bedroom to rest and recover without any outside stress because she is so fragile. She is not supposed to write in her journal and should have less than two hours of mental stimulation a day, but she breaks these rules. She secretly writes in her diary as an outlet for her creativity and her true feelings on her situation which she is forced to hide. She is forced to live as two separate people; the outside person who her husband wants her to be; well behaved and mild mannered who is in conflict with her true self who is frustrated and is forced to live only inside her mind and…

    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Usurpation of Identity in the Yellow Wallpaper
    • 1086 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Usurpation of Identity in the Yellow Wallpaper

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of a woman who goes mad while fixating on a bizarre wall-covering has been used as an early example of post-partum depression. In the latter part of the 1800’s women were seen as inferior subordinates to men who could not be trusted due to the effect of the female organs on their brains. The narrator is almost certainly a victim of the lack of medical knowledge of the day, while the prevailing attitudes in the medical field of women as childlike and the social pressure of male domination contribute to the narrator’s illness. The husband’s role as spouse and physician enable his benevolent manipulation of the narrator by isolating her and removing her societal roles as wife and mother in an effort to help her cure herself of her hysteria. Placed in a vacuum of selfhood in which the nanny and sister-in-law are allowed to usurp her identity, she is left no other choice but to create a new existence using the unhealthy stimulation of the yellow wallpaper.…

    • 1086 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Comparison of the Story of an Hour and a Sorrowful Woman
    • 695 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Comparison of the Story of an Hour and a Sorrowful Woman

    In "A Sorrowful Woman" the wife is depressed with her life, so much so, "The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again"(p.1). This wife and mother has come to detest her life, the sight of her family, and withdraws into a deep depression. The “wife” is unhappy in her life because she wants more than to be just a wife and mother. She wants a life outside the home but doesn’t know how to get it, so she blames her existing life and family. This unhappiness goes against society’s view that a woman should be satisfied being a wife and mother. Proof of the stereotypical relationship is the husband character. It’s not that he is written as dislikeable, but rather likable, strong, and completely in control, “He managed everything"(p.3). He never gets mad; he makes no demands of her to improve. He enables her “sickness” by preparing her “medication,” hiring help, and keeping her child away. He, however, never takes on an active role to help her. He doesn’t communicate with her. He doesn’t get her physiological help. He makes no attempt to prove her value to him, the child, or the house. Clearly he believes he’s in control. Her depression turns into anger with her life. She blames her family and acts out, "After supper several nights later, she hit the child. She had known she was going to do it when the father would see"(p. 2). In the end, she knows her life isn’t enough, but it isn’t the family’s fault. She goes to the kitchen and…

    • 695 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Best Essays

    Women and 19-Century Domesticity in "The Yellow Wallpaper"
    • 1964 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Women and 19-Century Domesticity in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman defies gender roles in the nineteenth century, by using the main character to show women need a creative outlet, to work, and not conform to the idealistic type of woman in the nineteenth century. She also shows this story is not specifically about one family by using generic names such as John and Mary (Ford 309). The use of these unspecific names suggests that Gilman is using the story to encompass all women and not just the main character of the story that is undergoing these persecutions (Ford 309). Throughout the story, the main character is trapped in a room with horrid yellow wallpaper. that her husband said he would change it out when they first rented the house, but now has no intention to. He believes that living with something she isn’t fond of will do her some good in recovery (Gilman “Yellow” 794). At first the yellow wallpaper has little meaning other than the fact that the main character hates it and almost refuses to…

    • 1964 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Best Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Story of an Hour" and "A Sorrowful Woman
    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Story of an Hour" and "A Sorrowful Woman

    The woman was so depressed about her life and the fact that she had a family that “the sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again.” Due to her physical abandonment of them, the husband was forced to take over…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Mental Health In 19th Century America
    • 1561 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Mental Health In 19th Century America

    Jane sees herself as an avid writer and is prohibited to enjoy her passion as an author. The weight of knowing that she cannot perform the one thing that her heart desires creates a feeling of suffocation and imprisonment in her. Not only is she prohibited from writing but she is also denied any physical activity or movement that she wishes to perform taking away all forms of freedom. John is Jane’s husband who is also a physician and from the narrator’s tone (Jane) their marriage does not seem to be one that is full of excitement and happiness. He has asked for his sister and housekeepers to keep a close eye on Jane to make sure that she does not tire herself nor write. He explains to his wife that all he wants is for her to get better and that these ‘boundaries’ are in her best interest when in reality they are far more harmful than any already manifested mental disease that she has. When women are deprived to perform they lose their touch with reality; John only views his wife as a means to reproduction and pleasure but no more than that. He has her imprisoned in what is thought to be a luxuriously beautiful house but to her is just a miserable prison…

    • 1561 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    cruelty against women
    • 538 Words
    • 3 Pages

    cruelty against women

    Her position has been reduced next to nothing to the extent that she cannot take a decision of her own. By virtue of this pathetic plight, she has been enduring cruelty meted out with her at the hands of her husband and his relatives.…

    • 538 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics