The Yellow Wallpaper -- essays research papers

"The yellow(a) Wallpaper", A Descent Into MadnessIn the nineteenth coke, women in literature were often portrayed as submissive to men. Literature of the catch often characterized women as oppressed by society, as well as by the male influences in their lives. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the sad story of a womans descent into depression and madness because of this oppression.The narrators declining mental health is reflected through the characteristics of the house she is trapped in and her husband, while trying to nurse her, is actually destroying her. The narrator of the story goes with her doctor/husband to stay in a colonial mansion for the summer. The house is supposed to be a place where she can recover from sever postpartum depression. According to Jennifer Fleissner, "natural scientist characters like the narrator of Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper" is shown obsessed with the details of an entrapping interiority . In such an example we see naturalisms clearest alteration of previous understandings of gender its refiguration of domestic spaces, and hence, domestic identity according to the narrative of repetitive work and coercion that had once served to distinguish public sustenance from a sentimentary understood interior(a)" Fleissner 59."The Yellow Wallpaper" is a fictionalized enumerate of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans own postpartum depression. Gilman was a social critic and feminist who wrote prolifically about the necessity of social and intimate equality, particularly about womens need for economic independence. According to critic Valarie Gill, "Gilman accustomed the nineteenth centurys configuration of close space as womans domain and its attendee generalizations about femininity. Gilman seeks to blur the distinction between private and public life. Gilman unflaggingly urged her earshot to consider their logic in assigning women to the home. The composition of home life altered radically between the beginning and final decades of the nineteenth century" (17).The narrator loves her cocker, besides knows she is not able to take care of him. "It is blushful Mary is so good with the baby. Such a deer baby And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me nervous" (Gilman 359). The symbolism utilized by Gilman is somewhat askew from the conventional. A house us... ...ver been written to show why so many woman go crazy, especially farmers wives, who live lonely, vapid lives. A husband of the kind described that he could not account for his wifes having gone insane &8211 for, said he, "to my certain knowledge she has scantily left her kitchen and bedroom in 30 years" (60). Critic Sharon Felton says, " stock-still if we should remove each legal and political discrimination against women even if we should comply their true gravitas and power as a sex so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic land labor and economically a non productive, dependent crystalise . The wonder is not that so many women let out down, but so few" (273). Critic Sharon Felton "Even if we should remove every legal and political discrimination against women even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic hand labor and economically a non productive, dependent class &8230.The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few."(273)