The Yellow Wallpaper Literary Analysis

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Literary Analysis of Female oppression in “The Yellow Wallpaper” The story is Gilman’s way of throwing off the restraints of the patriarchal society so that she can do what she loves, to write and advocate for women’s rights. In her story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman challenges the roles of women in this time period; such as viewing women as children, as prisoners, as domestic house slaves, their sanity and the dangers of being the quintessential passive, submissive woman. Gilman embraces as a writer that there is more to her as a person than that of what has been shoved upon her by society. She embraces feminism, which by definition is the belief that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities. Female oppression and how…show more content…
She does not want to stay in the house, “…there is something strange about the house-I can feel it” (Gilman 474). In that time period a woman’s identity as an adult was her home and children. Now her husband, brother and Dr. have taken it away from her. She is forced into a state of childish imprisonment. The “rest cure” was a real medical treatment that was prescribed by Dr. Weir Mitchell, where the patient (female) had to be isolated, forced feedings, and complete and total bed rest. Which in and of itself further proves that a woman who displayed so much as a hint of anxiety over her situation should be placed into a position of forced submissiveness, making her a prisoner of her own life in her own mind. In “The changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ ” Deborah Thomas quotes Dr. Mitchell directly saying that: “American woman is to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks that tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under pressure of those yet more exacting duties nowadays she is eager to share with the…show more content…
Determined to free the woman she saves her strength, she starts eating better and she regains her color but it is not because “the rest cure” is doing its job but because she is doing something for herself in spite of the watchful eye of her husband and Jennie, “ ‘I’ve got out at last in spite of you and Jane. And I have pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Gilman 482) By freeing the woman behind the bars of the paper, she has freed herself. This is where the roles of femininity and masculinity switch; her husband John faints when he sees what she has done which opposite of everything that is masculine, “Her husband, the force that keeps her in the home, has become an inanimate thing that she has to ‘creep over’….releases herself from her maternal role as she occupies the role of a ‘mad woman’” (Korb 3). The Narrator finally gives herself a name, Jane, having been released from her prison of her mind and the social prison that had her so confined; she is blissfully released into a clarity of
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