Feminism Essay: Most Popular Topics And Essay Sample

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman vividly portrays the treatment of women in the 19^th century when they behave in ways that were not acceptable to the men around them. In the story, the narrator is part of a traditional middle-class marriage of that era, and it is clear that the rigid role demarcation between men and women guaranteed that women would be treated as the weaker sex. The narrator is treated like a child, prevented from being involved in activities that are deemed to be too troubling, and so she is kept prisoner. While she is being “protected” from all of life’s worries, ironically it appears that the result is her descent into madness. This paper will discuss the role of women in American culture during the 19^th century, and the way that the narrator in the story is able to conquer the paternalistic treatment extended by her husband.The narrator is being kept closeted in a room allegedly in order to insulate her from the apparent stress that she has experienced following the birth of a child. It is unclear what, if any, behavior by the narrator has caused this action, but it is presented to her as a type of rest cure that she must undergo in order to avoid becoming too ill from the stress of her life. Her husband’s idea of a cure is to isolate her from others, and cut her off from all forms of intellectual and emotional stimulation; she has absolutely no control over any of the details of her life, and the implication is that her husband knows best, even though it is clear that he has misjudged her and he ends up treating her in a patronizing way as if she is a fragile child. The commentary about what this suggests about the treatment of women during the 19^th century is that they were not considered to be competent to make even trivial choices regarding what was best for them, and there is a hint that possibly any sign of emotion or animation resulted in women such as the narrator being labeled as breaking down emotionally or becoming insane unless the men intervened to thwart the situation. There are significant mental and physical limitations placed on the narrator, and her husband has acted in ways that completely repress her ability to express herself. He is motivated by trying to protect her from becoming injured, but in truth, his domination of her completely sabotages his intentions and instead, she has brought to the brink of insanity through his infantilizing of her.

During the 19^th century, the role of women was both assigned and defined by men; men perpetrated an ideological prison for women that resulted in the subjugation and silencing of women (Thomas.) Called “The Cult of True Womanhood”, women were channeled into specific roles, namely those of taking care of the home and the children. These roles were as rigid as those of servants. In the story, the narrator is confined to the summer home following her postpartum depression, and her husband attempts to completely dictate her ability to think by limiting all the stimuli to which she is exposed. He tries to completely curtail her ability to express herself, so that she is not able to talk about her worries or fears because of the threat that she will reveal her unhappiness. Her husband has forced her to be surrounded by mandatory silence and complete inactivity, i.e., the resting cure. She must remain passive, and is not allowed to use her mind for anything, especially writing. Her husband warns that she must curb her imagination because he believes that it will “run away with her.” This represented the male domination of the period, when women were seen as too vulnerable to any outside ideas that might threaten to disrupt their functioning. Her treatment reflects the fact that between the years of 1850 and 1900, women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways with which male society did not agree (Pouba.) In this narrator’s case, she was not actually institutionalized but rather, her husband created his own asylum for her, to lock her away both mentally and physically.

Ultimately, the wife is able to conquer the patriarchal culture embodied by her husband by expressing herself through writing despite his attempts to prevent her from doing so. She manages to use both her intelligence and her mental energy to disobey her husband’s need to maintain her in a traditional feminine role in a male-dominated society. The heroine’s commitment to writing can be seen as a distortion of cultural prescriptions about women’s primary duties (An Essay on Frances Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper:” the Invalid Woman Versus Invalid Treatment.) The narrator succeeds in escaping the monotony of her imprisonment both by writing and from finding refuge in the yellow wallpaper itself. This permits her to leave her quarters mentally by imagining a variety of activities and stories associated with the wallpaper, which takes on a life of its own. The wallpaper becomes the symbol of her own dull and disorganized existence; it essentially takes the form of her, a desperate female who is trying to find a way to escape from the bars of the cage in which she is confined. She defeats her husband’s domination by ultimately being able to escape her imprisonment through using her imagination, and if indeed she becomes insane because of this predicament, that is another form of victory as well: all of his efforts to protect her from any sort of upset or breakdown have actually caused her to break down. Being confined to the yellow wallpapered room has ultimately precipitated her ability to leave it. She has been able to defy the patriarchal intentions of her husband to keep her under his watch and away from any type of imaginative or intellectual activity.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is regarded as a feminist tale because it describes the way that women who were extremely controlled and limited by their cultural roles in the 19^th century were able to find ways to leave their prisons, literally and figuratively. Through their imaginations, they were able to prevail in pursuing their agendas despite the tremendous efforts by their male counterparts to stymie and stifle them and their ability to express themselves beyond the prescribed roles of the home. In this tale, a woman uses her own mind to defeat the crippling attempts of her husband to isolate her from the world, and she does so in spite of and because of his strongest efforts to incarcerate her in a prison of his making.