The Yellow Wallpaper -- essays research papers

"The Yellow Wallpaper", A Descent Into MadnessIn the nineteenth century, women in literature were often portrayed as instrumental to men. Literature of the period often characterized women as oppressed by society, as well as by the male influences in their lives. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the tragic story of a womans descent into depression and madness because of this oppression.The narrators declining mental health is reflected through the characteristics of the house she is trapped in and her husband, while trying to treasure her, is actually destroying her. The narrator of the story goes with her doctor/husband to stay in a colonial mansion for the summer. The house is supposed to be a fructify where she can recover from sever postpartum depression. According to Jennifer Fleissner, "naturalist characters like the narrator of Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper" is shown obsessed with the details of an entrapping interior ity. In such an prototype we see naturalisms clearest alteration of previous understandings of gender its refiguration of domestic spaces, and hence, domestic identity according to the narrative of repetitive work and compulsion that had once served to distinguish frequent life from a sentimentary understood floor" Fleissner 59."The Yellow Wallpaper" is a fictionalized account of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans own postpartum depression. Gilman was a social critic and feminist who wrote prolifically or so the necessity of social and sexual equality, particularly about womens need for economic independence. According to critic Valarie Gill, "Gilman attached the nineteenth centurys configuration of private space as womans domain and its attendant generalizations about femininity. Gilman seeks to blur the distinction between private and public life. Gilman unflaggingly urged her audience to consider their logic in assigning women to the home. The composition of home life altered radically between the beginning and final decades of the nineteenth century" (17).The narrator loves her baby, but knows she is not able to take care of him. "It is favored Mary is so good with the baby. Such a deer baby And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me nervous" (Gilman 359). The symbolism utilized by Gilman is fairly askew from the conventional. A house us... ...ver been written to show why so many woman go crazy, especially farmers wives, who live lonely, monotonous lives. A husband of the kind described that he could not account for his wifes having gone insane & amp8211 for, said he, "to my certain knowledge she has hardly left her kitchen and bedroom in 30 years" (60). Critic Sharon Felton says, "Even if we should move back every legal and political discrimination against women even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the leve l of private domestic land drive and economically a non productive, dependent class . The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few" (273). Critic Sharon Felton "Even if we should remove every legal and political discrimination against women even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic hand labor and economically a non productive, dependent class &8230.The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few."(273)