Essay On The Yellow Wallpaper Sexism

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.” Women allowed men to overpower them just because they thought they didn’t have the right to say no to a man. But who gave man the right to say what is wrong or right? Women have not always been what they are today. In a very antifeminist time, men strived for the power to control their wives; how they thought and acted. When women finally started to realize that they were their own person and they didn’t need a man to tell them what to do, they started to break free of their prisons and speak their own minds. In the Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, a woman is shown constantly struggling against the extreme sexism …show more content…
The house, symbolizing the sexist oppression, keeps the narrator locked up inside so she cannot go into the outside world. Such as society forces women to keep their true selves locked away inside, until they cannot stand it anymore. With its “Barred windows” and “gates that lock”, the narrator feels like “there is something strange about the house.” The house is shut off from the rest of civilization, much like society shut women off. Society secluded women and shut them off from the rest of the world. They were in their own little place, where they had to act think and do like they were expected to do. The nursery that they stay in has barred windows so the children couldn’t escape, and it also has the horrific yellow wallpaper. She says, “the windows are barred for little children.” By keeping her in a nursery that has barred windows, she is being treated like a child. She knows that something is wrong, but for the sake of pleasing her husband the narrator stays silent, much like a child would to obey its parents. The narrator uses personification to describe the wallpaper and tells us, “[that she had never seen] so much expression in an inanimate thing before.” She also goes on to say “It is always the same shape, only …show more content…
The wallpaper, imprisoning and mocking, tried to control the woman. She became almost obsessed with figuring out its intricate pattern, that she didn’t notice she was steadily letting the wallpaper control her like the other women behind it. Finally, she has “‘[gotten] out at last…And [she’s] pulled off most of the paper. so [they can’t put her back]!’” Just like that woman finally getting out from underneath the demeaning rule of her husband and the controlling wallpaper, women finally got out from underneath the oppression in society, and its lust for power, to where they could be free and not have to depend on men to tell them what to