In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we see the gender roles of the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class and the harmful effects that they can have on both men and women. Gender roles in society are ever changing due to progressive ideas but at the time in history that this short story was written, women and men had precise ways of living. If a man or women stepped out of their role in society than they were deemed as insane or not healthy. Often times when people read The Yellow Wallpaper, they see the husband portrayed as the villain but that is not true. Both people are hurt in the end when the wife is no longer sane and the husband is unconscious due to seeing his wife in such a low mental state.
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John threatens to send her to a different physician if she does not get better. As an attempt to revive her health, the woman spends most of her time alone in the master bedroom staring at the wallpaper. Ironically, the act of her following her husbands rules to get her better is what eventually leads to the obsession with the yellow wallpaper and the narrator’s mental decomposition. Because the women is not able to naturally stimulate her highly imaginative mind, she still is imaginative but in an unhealthy manner. (Haney-Peritz, 116)
Janice Haney-Peritz, who is head of the Department of English at Beaver College, took a close look at the mental breakdown of the narrator in Monumental feminism and literature’s ancestral house: Another look at “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The narrators first realization of the wallpaper is that it, “is dull enough to confuse the following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge of at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradiction’s”(Gilman, …show more content…
In Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Greg Johnson, Johnson connects Gilman’s story with the story of Emily Dickinson and her birth. The story is that before Dickinson was born, her mother demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done so she went secretly to the paperhanger and had him do it while Emily was being born. (Johnson,1) Johnson states that, “Although Ms. Dickinson was by most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman- in short, the nineteenth century ideal- it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident, as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion.” (Johnson,
John threatens to send her to a different physician if she does not get better. As an attempt to revive her health, the woman spends most of her time alone in the master bedroom staring at the wallpaper. Ironically, the act of her following her husbands rules to get her better is what eventually leads to the obsession with the yellow wallpaper and the narrator’s mental decomposition. Because the women is not able to naturally stimulate her highly imaginative mind, she still is imaginative but in an unhealthy manner. (Haney-Peritz, 116)
Janice Haney-Peritz, who is head of the Department of English at Beaver College, took a close look at the mental breakdown of the narrator in Monumental feminism and literature’s ancestral house: Another look at “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The narrators first realization of the wallpaper is that it, “is dull enough to confuse the following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge of at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradiction’s”(Gilman, …show more content…
In Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Greg Johnson, Johnson connects Gilman’s story with the story of Emily Dickinson and her birth. The story is that before Dickinson was born, her mother demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done so she went secretly to the paperhanger and had him do it while Emily was being born. (Johnson,1) Johnson states that, “Although Ms. Dickinson was by most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman- in short, the nineteenth century ideal- it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident, as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion.” (Johnson,