“The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Happy Ending? Critics generally agree that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a woman’s attempt to escape the “entrapment of the female illness experience of the nineteenth-century” (Hume 477). Using the “properties of illness” outlined in Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” as a framework to define the illness experience, this paper will establish the female illness experience to be one with both medical components— aspects of illness defined by one’s own perceptions
main characters in the novel, we too have “been in Starkfield too many winters.” While Plath’s poetry is arguably a dark embodiment of America as the home and great power symbolic of America’s fight for independence which reflects her rejection of Patriarchy and the domestic through her writings. The first line of Lesbos, Plath positions the poem’s conflict in the realm of the domestic: ‘Viciousness in the kitchen!’ These hostilities take place in the kitchen, the heart of the housewife’s home, suggesting
the ‘hardest things’, even to her own family. Gilman, a feminist writer, uses characters in her often satirical short stories to highlight the experiences of a woman living in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. Her most famous story, The Yellow Wallpaper records her ‘narrow escape’ from ‘complete mental ruin’ , and, along with her other stories expounds truths about feminine injustice. Wharton looks at the relationships one man has with two women; one