Feminism In The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story of one woman’s descent into madness, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s response to the male-run medical establishment of the nineteenth-century household. Gilman’s short story is yielding her readers about the consequences of fixed gender roles assigned by male-dominated societies, the man’s role being that of the husband and a sensible thinker where the woman’s role being that of the dutiful wife who does not question her husband’s authority, which makes this story ideal to criticize gender roles and feminism. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman depicts a marriage in which both the narrator and her husband are trapped in their assigned roles and are doomed because of this.
The story focuses on the narrator’s “nervous condition” as she slowly loses sense of reality and sanity, the whole time being completely misread and misdiagnosed by her husband, a doctor who believes the best treatment is for her to confine herself to her
The narrator, on the other hand, is represented as overemotional and not to be taken seriously. Rather than being described as rational, she is described as being “imaginative”. Most women are also given this stereotype, being imaginative is feminine and weak but women are not allowed to be seen as rational. Because John believes that he is supposed to function as the thinking partner in his marriage, he won’t let his wife think for herself. Most of the time when she tries to talk to John, he ignores her and calls her names, such as “blessed little goose” and “little girl.” These are names for kids, and that is how John treats his wife; like a child. He says to her, “I am a doctor, dear, and I know” because he thinks of himself as the more intelligent partner in the marriage, John assumes that he knows more than his wife about her condition because as a woman, she is “too imaginative” to understand her own