The Yellow Wallpaper Marriage Analysis

In today’s generation, the way a man treats a woman is a major factor. A man is expected to treat his lady as if she is the “only woman in the world”. Mistreatment towards a woman would make a man an outcast. The narrator in Charlotte Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, refers to her husband as being wise and loving. John is not wise and loving because he does not respect the narrator, he does not care about the narrator’s needs and wants, the narrator is afraid, and he underestimates the narrator’s illness. At the beginning of the story, there is an immediate lack of respect from John towards the narrator. The narrator states, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (Gilman 508). John laughing at her is a huge form of disrespect towards the narrator. However, the author puts this quotation in the story to show how the narrator is clueless of her mistreatment. Remember how the narrator says, “...one expects that in marriage”? The author is showing that the narrator believes that her husband laughing at her is normal. Towards the end of the story, he also …show more content…
When John and the narrator arrive to the house, the narrator initially wants the wallpaper to be removed. However, it states, “At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me…” (Gilman 510) Instead of repapering the room as she wished, he refused to make her comfortable while she rested; this caused her to later go insane from staring at the wallpaper constantly, trying to figure it out. One night the narrator didn’t want to wake John and said, “... I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim”. (Gilman 510) The author says this because it shows the difference in how the narrator and John care for each other. The narrator wouldn’t make John uncomfortable for anything, but John doesn’t make an effort to make the narrator