Examples Of Patriarchy In The Yellow Wallpaper

Getting Out at Last is Not a Silly Fancy The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” lives in a time of rampant patriarchy. Male dominance in the Victorian Era often suffocates a woman’s ability to access societal opportunities at an equal rate. The power structure of this time classifies a woman’s existence by how adequately she fulfills her perceived life’s duty—serving a husband and loving him for the opportunity. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a woman of this era—uses a woman narrator to implicate patriarchy’s role in stifling women’s freedom by having the narrator personify yellow wallpaper, as her husband, John, disregards her appeals for mental and physical liberation. Gilman shows how access to liberty should not be gender-specific, and how systems of oppression must be examined, not ignored. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s use of personification in “The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates how unbridled patriarchy, however well meaning, incarcerates women’s liberty. …show more content…
Although it is never explicitly mentioned because she fails to connect the dots, one can assume that this home is actually an abandoned insane asylum. The narrator explains that John, a physician, has diagnosed her with “temporary nervous depression” (85), and throughout the story she makes observations about her room, such as that “the windows are barred” (87), there’s a “gate at the head of the stairs” (88), “the floor is scratched and gouged” (89), and the “bedstead [is] nailed down” (98). It is here where her husband suggests she remain, and where she begins to secretly write about transforming the yellow wallpaper on the wall as she begins to mentally