Essay On The Role Of Women In The Yellow Wallpaper

Over the course of time, women have been seen as mothers, carers, sexual objects and inferior to men. The contrast between the views of women in different periods of history differs significantly from each other as shown in famous pieces of Literature. For instance, during the 19th century, particularly the Victorian Era women were portrayed to be mothers; their primary function was to procreate. Women were not seen as important in a patriarchal society, leaving them to be seen as the weaker, delicate sex in a male-dominated world. They were expected to carry out specific duties and ‘obligations’ such as taking care of the home and children. Often, the conditions of women during this time are compared to slavery, controlled by their husbands, …show more content…
It is a story about feminism, exploring what difficulties women went through and how they were pressured into accepting their given roles as housewives and nothing more. Gilman describes what the role of women was seen as and how they were expected to always do as they were told and become blindly submissive to their husbands, not being allowed to think for themselves. At the beginning, a young, nameless, woman is portrayed entering early stages of insanity after giving birth to her first child. Her husband, John takes her on a ‘rest cure’ to help her recover in a colonial mansion. She is taken to a room which used to be a nursery. It is severely damaged, though the cause of this is unknown. The narrator dedicates many journal entries describing the yellow wallpaper in the room. Eventually, she says that the more one stays in the room, the more the wallpaper seems to mutate. She sees the wallpaper as a “woman creeping on all fours behind the pattern” and begins to rip off the wallpaper to ‘free’ the woman that she believes is stuck. The creeping woman who is stuck behind the wallpaper is most likely a representation of victimisation and resistance to societal