yellow wallpaper

A detailed Summary of yellow wallpaper

The vision of hysterical women in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Inherited ideology has traditionally constructed men as more susceptible to hold the power in our society. Women have been treated as second class citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has significantly contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Most feminist criticisms contend that literature, either supports the society's inherited structure or provides a social criticism in order to change these hierarchies. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts one woman's struggle against the traditional female role and the effect of women domination during the nineteenth century's society. She challenges the notion that though women are physically strong enough to carry the burden of childbirth, yet they are viewed as incapable of the strength of character necessary to work outside of their home. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper", that is considered as suffering from hysteria, falls slowly into madness due to her husband's coercion. The primary intent of Gilman's short story is t

weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to

Gilman's aim was to indict not only Weir Mitchell but more generally men's behavior toward women as a contributing factor to their illness. "The Yellow Wallpaper" mirrors the restricted condition of women at the time suffering from those afflictions. Because nineteenth century's women did not have enthusiastic activities nor real social life, they could not succeed to find a physical and mental equilibrium. the lack of motion and action contribute to their distress. As Charcot pointed it out, the lack of activities is very often the origin of melancholic and depressing ideas. As for the author, Gilman, the medication to hysteria would preconize a lively existence in which time will not be spend to think over morbid ideas but in the contrary to step forward a positive thinking through both an interesting activity and a caring surrounding.

The grammatical figure (chiasm or crossing) "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled" prepares us for the exchange of roles at the end, where the woman reading (and writing) the text becomes the figure of madness within it. If Gilman creates a literary double for herself in the domestic confinement of her hysterical narrator, her narrator too is engaged in a fantastic form of re-presentation, a doubling where the narrator divides herself into two distinct selves. The reader gets to learn the protagonist name, Jane, when her personality manifests symptoms of schizophrenia at the end of the novel, she refers to herself as somebody else: "'I've got you at last' said I, 'In spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!'" (19). She is fighting with the woman "who was shaking the paper" because she cannot dissociate her fantasy from reality. The reason why the narrator has wanted to strangle the woman behind the paper is to free her self. For that woman, the tragic product of the society is the narrator self. By rejecting that woman, she might free the other imprisoned woman within herself.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" presents itself as the writing of a young woman, who along with her physician-husband and her sister-in-law is spending the summer in what she calls an "ancestral hall". The narrator, Jane, that is suffering from "temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency-" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 3) after the birth of her child is ordered to remain in bed to convalesce. The condition of the narrator is such that she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work'" and unable to "relieve the press of ideas" (3) through creative endeavors (she expresses recurrently her will to lighten the press of ideas via writing). Not only does her confinement deteriorate her health from a "slight hysterical tendency" to a complete madness but more importantly, it diminishes her motherhood. Her child, whom she mentions briefly the existence (in relation to the wallpaper), is kept apart in another room with a nanny. From her detainment will result uncanny hallucinations. As Hoffman, in "The Sandman", the reader encounters difficulties to locate the limit between reality and fantasy. Is the automate real or is it merely the consequence of the narrator's imagination? The story's stealthy uncanniness, its sidelong approach both to the condition of women and to the unspeakably antagonistic female body, emerges most clearly in the oscillation of the word "creepy" from figurative to literal: "John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy"(11). The link between female oppression, hysteria, and the uncanny occurs in the letter of the text; in a word, whose meaning sketches the repressed connection between women's social situation, their sickness, and their bodies. Reading the "slight hysterical tendency" displayed by "The Yellow Wallpaper" involves tracing the repr

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Approximate Word count = 3360
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English