Gender Oppression In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short-story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published in 1892 in The New England Magazine. Given the manner in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper stands out as one of the ancient voices that agitated for American feminist agendas illustrating issues about women’s physical and mental health as were perceived in the 19th century. The story is written in the first person showing a collection of journal entries by a woman who is oppressed and denied a chance to express herself or even work by her physician husband. This condition frustrates her health in the end becoming psychotic becoming paranoid about any human contact and this makes her lock herself in a solitary room where she feels safe and she …show more content…
The writer uses Jane’s insanity as a way of protesting professional and medical oppression she is suscepted to and as an indicator of the similar oppression that were forced on women at the time. This indicates that inasmuch as male counterparts such as her husband try to act in their best interests, they always depict women as weaklings and fragile especially considering that cases of women being diagnosed with mental illness at the time were very rampant. Jane says, “I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (Gilman 758). Here Gilman shows the oppression that Jane feels through frustrations that do not allow her to think independently and assert her position within the society. It is a criticism to the 19th century society that did not provide societal space for women to think independently about their place in the society and assert their place in the society through interaction with their intellectual peers as Jane would have …show more content…
Among other themes, the author creates the character of Jane who is the main protagonist in the story being the woman whose freedom, rights, privileges, and sanity has been taken by the men around her and the society at large. Through the voice of the narrator, Gilman challenges the status quo that appeared to confine women to remain indoors without the freedom to express themselves professionally within the society. Because of the confinement in a solitary room that she has been forced to be in, Jane loses her sanity and through her sanity, Gilman protests against the continued oppression that women of the time were suscepted