Gender In The Snows Of Kilimanjaro By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Superior Essays
Gender
The thing about gender is this, it does not matter if someone is male or female; life will kill everyone and mistreat us all. Bit over the top? Not even in the slightest. Dreams are only dreams, reality is far from a dream and very close to a nightmare. Gender is just a distraction, actually focusing on gender is the issue. Men and women are both human, who cares if women have more emotions and men are viewed as being burlier, at the end of the day it takes both men and women to survive this tragic thing called life. In the short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman we see men and women interacting with each other as relationship partners or marital partners.
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Harry has given up on his desire to want to stay alive in the current conditions that he is in. He wants to simply give up, and leave his wife Helen alone to raise the children. By doing this, he leaves Helen discouraged and saddened by the obvious lack of love being displayed. Many times throughout the story Harry touches on how rich his wife is. It becomes very apparent early on that the two do not care for one another in the same way. To Harry, Helen was considered the “bread maker” in the relationship; she supplied love and money to Harry. By living off of his wife’s assets, he chose to not live out his dreams to become a famous writer. In his state of despair he blames his wife for his own lack of ambition. While Harry is dealing with the gangrene, Helen tries everything in her power to help him and ease his mind. She wants him to stay positive and not harm his health anymore by drinking. He has zero regard for his caring wife and treats her with no respect. Helen does not want to be left alone and wants her husband to live so the two can continue their life together. Helen’s love for Harry is everlasting and she truly loves him. This love is not reciprocated and she is left disappointed and filled with …show more content…
According to him, the story is thus a feminist critique of men who are “essentially responsible for the narrator’s physical confinement and subsequent mental demise” (Bak 40). He bases his interpretation of the text around the comparison of the narrator’s confinement in her room to being in a ‘Panopticon’ – a concept previously patterned by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century and later discussed by Michel Foucault. The Panopticon is in essence a prison, where one is always aware of being constantly watched and this creates a deeply rooted paranoia. The narrator’s room indeed resembles a Panopticon; there are bars on the windows, rings in the walls to strap her down, the bed is nailed to the floor and ‘bulbous eyes’ are staring at her from the

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