Poem Analysis: Imprisoned In Marriage
Jessica Compton
Composition II
Mrs. Govia
July 17, 2013
Imprisoned in Marriage
“I’m wife; I’ve finished that” by Emily Dickinson can be comparable to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman. Both literatures are written from a feminist prospective and have to do with patriarchal societies. Both pieces of literature were written during patriarchal time periods. Just like in The Yellow Wallpaper, in the poem “I’m wife”, the woman is submissive to her husband, and is unable to be herself, but only a wife and the woman that society has made her be. In both works, it talks about how it is better for the woman to stay as the figure society has made her, and both works use symbols to demonstrate how these patriarchal societies work, and …show more content…
the women’s battle against it. First, I will analyze the poem by Emily Dickinson and give reasoning that shows that Dickinson is battling against a patriarchal society, just as the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is. In the poem, Emily Dickinson talks about how the woman turns into the wife and that is the top that women reach. Once they become the wife, they are to be submissive to the husband and the man is the one in control, and a “wife” is what they are now, not an individual woman. These women are living behind the shadows of their husband. In the poem, Dickinson said “I’m wife, I’ve finished that/ I’m woman now.” In this statement, I feel like Dickinson is meaning that she isn’t a complete woman until she has become a wife, and is submissive to a male. Another line in the poem is “I’m ‘wife’! Stop there!” I interpret from this line that once again, Dickinson is emphasizing how a woman becomes a wife, and that’s it. Saputri said in her criticism about this poem that “It is natural for woman to stop at ‘wife’, because as a wife, the woman must go along with her husband.” In the poem, Dickinson wrote “I’m woman now/ It’s safer so”, which is saying that being a wife is the safer alternative in this society. To be a woman unmarried isn’t “safe” in this society, meaning that it isn’t ideal to be a woman without a man to lead her. Dressman said “It creates a picture of total submission to the omniscient husband as a path to new maturity. In the poem, Dickinson talks of this woman figure that society has made, and is almost mocking this figure. The definition that society has made a woman is a “wife”, and nothing more. With the line “It’s safer so”, Dickinson is saying that it is safer to be a wife in this society than it is to be a woman with out marriage. The identity of being a wife is a safer identity. Saputri claims that as a wife she feels “safer and more comfortable”. One thing that you can notice in the poem is that wife and woman are in quotation marks. Saputri states that this may be because these words seem foreign to Dickinson. Wife and woman could also be in quotation marks because they have generalized every woman and wife under these categories as groups, so that they are only a wife, not given an individual name. In the poem, Dickinson writes “this being comfort/ then that other kind was pain”. In this line, Dickinson is saying that becoming a wife is a comfort to women. In the rest of the line, she is saying that not being married which is “that other kind” in the poem is painful. A symbol used in the poem is the soft eclipse that describes the changing of a girl to a woman, when she becomes married. Saputri describes it as a shelter from pain. The eclipse represents how once the girl changes to a woman after becoming married, there is no other point of development afterwards, which is why Dickinson chooses an eclipse to symbolize this. “Here the point of view is set after marriage, and the persona remarks in the second stanza that her present state of wedlock is as different from her maidenhood as life after death from earthly existence” (Dressman). When Dickinson compares becoming married to life after death, she is saying how society believes that a woman is not alive until she gets married. Also the metrical form that Dickinson uses shows that she is battling against a patriarchal society. The thoughts are incomplete and the way the poem is written compared to male writers of this time period show that women were unable to develop past the “woman” definition that society pinned against them. Critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar who have studied female writers to male tradition have laid the groundwork to what Dickinson’s iambic pentameter means (Finch). These critics have studied many metrical patterns and they claim that this is a “patriarchal poetic tradition”. Finch stated that iambic pentameter “expresses” the woman battling against patriarchal society, so this is more evidence that Dickinson is fighting a patriarchal society. Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a powerful story about feminism. Because of the time period that this story was written, the narrator in the story is fighting against a patriarchal society and trying to escape her mental sickness by escaping the bars that Victorian society has put up for women. The narrator’s submission to her husband, definition of women, and the symbol of the wallpaper in the story all show that the narrator is battling against patriarchy, not an illness. This story is very similar to the poem, “I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That”. The narrator is very submissive to her husband, John throughout the story.
John is a physician of high standing, and what he says about her condition and treatment is what is “right”. In the story the narrator states “if a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? My brother is also a physician of high standing and he says the same thing. Personally I don’t agree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 355). The narrator is unable to say what she thinks, because her friends believe what her husband, a male physician of high standing, says over what she says. Kasmer said, “the narrator’s husband has taken away his wife’s ability to speak her own thoughts by reassuring her friends that there is ‘really nothing the matter’ with her”. John is robbing the narrator of a voice and belittles her. He doesn’t take the illness seriously, so it convinces the narrator to believe that he is right and she is fine. The room that the narrator is confined in, she describes was once a “nursery” (Gilman), which infantilizes the narrator also. The narrator isn’t given a voice in her own life and is not in control, just as a child is. The narrator acts like a child around her husband and is unable to talk to him about how she really feels, …show more content…
because she knows that he will only treat her like a child. John hardly lets her stir “without special direction” (Gilman 356) and even refers to her once as “little girl” (Gilman 360). John is so controlling that he won’t let the narrator stay in the room that she wanted to stay in. The narrator tells John that she doesn’t want to stay in the room upstairs, but John “would not hear of it” (Gilman 355). John says that staying in the room is better for her health, and so is the wallpaper. He says that taking down the wallpaper would only give her something else to obsess over, and she has to learn not to. Once again, he is treating her like a child and not his wife. The narrator is imprisoned within her own marriage, and that is what leads her to tearing down the wallpaper so that she can “release” the woman trapped, which is stated by Kasmer in her analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper.
The journal that she writes in symbolizes the “release” of the woman trapped inside the wallpaper.
The narrator writes “I don’t know why I write this… John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (Gilman 359). This shows that the narrator is trying to find some way to express herself, because she can’t do so with John, so she writes and this is her form of release.
The narrator defines women throughout the story as well. She describes the wallpaper and the women trapped inside it. The narrator says of Jennie, “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no other profession” (Gilman 358). This shows that the narrator believes a woman’s role is a housekeeper since that is all she knows. The narrator is characterized as a writer, because she is unlike the other women. John warns her against this imagination and forbids her to write, which again is controlling of
John.
Men in the story surround the narrator and the females in the house seem to be “cardboard figures cut out by patriarchy” (Ford 309). This is a fitting phrase to describe these women, because that is what a patriarchal society does and is what it has done to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. Society assumes that all women are the same, and not individuals in the society. Haney Peritz wrote “the text’s second movement wherein the narrator counterpointed her description of Jennie as the perfect housekeeper with a remark that the wallpaper had some kind of subpattern—a ‘formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design’”. This line in the story is a definition that the narrator uses to define those women herself. She sees them as ‘formless figures’ that have nothing more to them than society’s definition of them. In the story, Gilman wrote “it is like a woman stopping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (360). Talking about the women as if they are creeping along behind the wallpaper symbolizes the women “tip-toeing” around in Victorian society who are unable to truly express themselves. These women creeping could mean that they are walking around carefully, so that they don’t disrupt society’s definition of them.
The narrator also provides a definition of herself in the story. She uses the place that they are staying to symbolize herself. She describes it as “beautiful place”, but “the place has been empty for years” (Gilman 355). I believe that the narrator is very comparable to this place. She has felt empty for many years as she has gone through this “illness”. The room that the narrator is confined in has also been used as a symbol to symbolize the situation of women in patriarchal society (Kasmer). The definitions and symbols that the narrator uses to describe women and their situation show that the narrator is battling this patriarchal society, and that it is not just a “mental illness”.
The wallpaper that the narrator studies and obsesses over symbolizes the women in this society trapped inside the wallpaper, “the bars of society”. It seems the “prison” isn’t just confinement, but torture as well as indicated in the descriptions of the wallpaper: “there is a recurrent spot where the pattern looks like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (Gilman 357) and “it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be” (Gilman 361). The wallpaper also represents the writing itself, in that the wallpaper is “an unheard of contradictions” and the narrator also claims that writing would do her good, but it also tires her (Haney-Peritz). The women in this society are stuck in these contradictions within themselves. The narrator feels one way, but then again is almost convinced to feel another way that society tells her. John tells the narrator that things like writing would only make her tired, and she needs to rest. The narrator admits that writing does her good, but John has convinced her that it will only tire her. This patriarchal society has confused the narrator in that she doesn’t know what is good for her and is contradicting herself. The narrator can tell that something is wrong with herself, but because of society, she thinks it is only an illness, when it is really not being able to be herself. It’s not just the narrator that is trapped. “I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of” (Gilman 359). This line tells me that there are all types of unique women behind this wallpaper, but are all trapped in the same way. The narrator writes, “round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!” (Gilman 362), which is symbolic of the women going through their “routine” that society has given them. The narrator is focused on figuring out what the pattern means and is “determined that nobody shall find it out but myself” (Gilman 361). This wallpaper gives her a sense of control over something that she has never experienced before. The narrator then rips the wallpaper off the walls and people say that it is the construction of women’s discourse, but I agree with Ford when he states that it is more of a retreat from this discourse (311-312). In the way the narrator describes the wallpaper, it is obvious that it is about women battling inequality and being trapped by the patriarchal bars of society. Dickinson and Gilman both have battled against a patriarchal society, and use a lot of the same examples to show that these writings were during a time of feminism. They both show how women were behind the shadows of men, had a definition to go by, and used other symbols in the writings to show that this was against a patriarchal society. Both pieces of literature are written during a time period that women were to be only wives and to submit to their husbands entirely. Many women during this time period were imprisoned within their own marriage, just like the women in these pieces of literature.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston, Little Brown: 1924. Web. 29 June 2013.
Dressman, Michael. “Empress of Calvary: Mystical Marriage in the Poems of Emily Dickinson.” South Atlantic Bulletin. 42.1 (Jan. 1977): 39-43. JSTOR. Web. 1 July 2013.
Finch, A. R. C. “Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes.” PMLA. 102.2 (Mar. 1987): 166-176. JSTOR. Web. 1 July 2013.
Ford, Karen. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Women’s Discourse.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2 (1985): 309-314. JSTOR. Web. 30 May 2013.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. Shorter 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2010. 354-365. Print.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. UMI Research Press, 1989: 95-107. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 May 2013.
Kasmer, Lisa. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Symptomatic Reading.” Literature and Psychology. 36.3 (1990): 1-15. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 May 2013.
Saputri, Ardika. “A Feminist Literary Criticism of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That’.” She Uban’s Chronicles. Web. 1 July 2013.
Composition II
Mrs. Govia
July 17, 2013
Imprisoned in Marriage
“I’m wife; I’ve finished that” by Emily Dickinson can be comparable to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman. Both literatures are written from a feminist prospective and have to do with patriarchal societies. Both pieces of literature were written during patriarchal time periods. Just like in The Yellow Wallpaper, in the poem “I’m wife”, the woman is submissive to her husband, and is unable to be herself, but only a wife and the woman that society has made her be. In both works, it talks about how it is better for the woman to stay as the figure society has made her, and both works use symbols to demonstrate how these patriarchal societies work, and …show more content…
the women’s battle against it. First, I will analyze the poem by Emily Dickinson and give reasoning that shows that Dickinson is battling against a patriarchal society, just as the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is. In the poem, Emily Dickinson talks about how the woman turns into the wife and that is the top that women reach. Once they become the wife, they are to be submissive to the husband and the man is the one in control, and a “wife” is what they are now, not an individual woman. These women are living behind the shadows of their husband. In the poem, Dickinson said “I’m wife, I’ve finished that/ I’m woman now.” In this statement, I feel like Dickinson is meaning that she isn’t a complete woman until she has become a wife, and is submissive to a male. Another line in the poem is “I’m ‘wife’! Stop there!” I interpret from this line that once again, Dickinson is emphasizing how a woman becomes a wife, and that’s it. Saputri said in her criticism about this poem that “It is natural for woman to stop at ‘wife’, because as a wife, the woman must go along with her husband.” In the poem, Dickinson wrote “I’m woman now/ It’s safer so”, which is saying that being a wife is the safer alternative in this society. To be a woman unmarried isn’t “safe” in this society, meaning that it isn’t ideal to be a woman without a man to lead her. Dressman said “It creates a picture of total submission to the omniscient husband as a path to new maturity. In the poem, Dickinson talks of this woman figure that society has made, and is almost mocking this figure. The definition that society has made a woman is a “wife”, and nothing more. With the line “It’s safer so”, Dickinson is saying that it is safer to be a wife in this society than it is to be a woman with out marriage. The identity of being a wife is a safer identity. Saputri claims that as a wife she feels “safer and more comfortable”. One thing that you can notice in the poem is that wife and woman are in quotation marks. Saputri states that this may be because these words seem foreign to Dickinson. Wife and woman could also be in quotation marks because they have generalized every woman and wife under these categories as groups, so that they are only a wife, not given an individual name. In the poem, Dickinson writes “this being comfort/ then that other kind was pain”. In this line, Dickinson is saying that becoming a wife is a comfort to women. In the rest of the line, she is saying that not being married which is “that other kind” in the poem is painful. A symbol used in the poem is the soft eclipse that describes the changing of a girl to a woman, when she becomes married. Saputri describes it as a shelter from pain. The eclipse represents how once the girl changes to a woman after becoming married, there is no other point of development afterwards, which is why Dickinson chooses an eclipse to symbolize this. “Here the point of view is set after marriage, and the persona remarks in the second stanza that her present state of wedlock is as different from her maidenhood as life after death from earthly existence” (Dressman). When Dickinson compares becoming married to life after death, she is saying how society believes that a woman is not alive until she gets married. Also the metrical form that Dickinson uses shows that she is battling against a patriarchal society. The thoughts are incomplete and the way the poem is written compared to male writers of this time period show that women were unable to develop past the “woman” definition that society pinned against them. Critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar who have studied female writers to male tradition have laid the groundwork to what Dickinson’s iambic pentameter means (Finch). These critics have studied many metrical patterns and they claim that this is a “patriarchal poetic tradition”. Finch stated that iambic pentameter “expresses” the woman battling against patriarchal society, so this is more evidence that Dickinson is fighting a patriarchal society. Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a powerful story about feminism. Because of the time period that this story was written, the narrator in the story is fighting against a patriarchal society and trying to escape her mental sickness by escaping the bars that Victorian society has put up for women. The narrator’s submission to her husband, definition of women, and the symbol of the wallpaper in the story all show that the narrator is battling against patriarchy, not an illness. This story is very similar to the poem, “I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That”. The narrator is very submissive to her husband, John throughout the story.
John is a physician of high standing, and what he says about her condition and treatment is what is “right”. In the story the narrator states “if a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? My brother is also a physician of high standing and he says the same thing. Personally I don’t agree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 355). The narrator is unable to say what she thinks, because her friends believe what her husband, a male physician of high standing, says over what she says. Kasmer said, “the narrator’s husband has taken away his wife’s ability to speak her own thoughts by reassuring her friends that there is ‘really nothing the matter’ with her”. John is robbing the narrator of a voice and belittles her. He doesn’t take the illness seriously, so it convinces the narrator to believe that he is right and she is fine. The room that the narrator is confined in, she describes was once a “nursery” (Gilman), which infantilizes the narrator also. The narrator isn’t given a voice in her own life and is not in control, just as a child is. The narrator acts like a child around her husband and is unable to talk to him about how she really feels, …show more content…
because she knows that he will only treat her like a child. John hardly lets her stir “without special direction” (Gilman 356) and even refers to her once as “little girl” (Gilman 360). John is so controlling that he won’t let the narrator stay in the room that she wanted to stay in. The narrator tells John that she doesn’t want to stay in the room upstairs, but John “would not hear of it” (Gilman 355). John says that staying in the room is better for her health, and so is the wallpaper. He says that taking down the wallpaper would only give her something else to obsess over, and she has to learn not to. Once again, he is treating her like a child and not his wife. The narrator is imprisoned within her own marriage, and that is what leads her to tearing down the wallpaper so that she can “release” the woman trapped, which is stated by Kasmer in her analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper.
The journal that she writes in symbolizes the “release” of the woman trapped inside the wallpaper.
The narrator writes “I don’t know why I write this… John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (Gilman 359). This shows that the narrator is trying to find some way to express herself, because she can’t do so with John, so she writes and this is her form of release.
The narrator defines women throughout the story as well. She describes the wallpaper and the women trapped inside it. The narrator says of Jennie, “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no other profession” (Gilman 358). This shows that the narrator believes a woman’s role is a housekeeper since that is all she knows. The narrator is characterized as a writer, because she is unlike the other women. John warns her against this imagination and forbids her to write, which again is controlling of
John.
Men in the story surround the narrator and the females in the house seem to be “cardboard figures cut out by patriarchy” (Ford 309). This is a fitting phrase to describe these women, because that is what a patriarchal society does and is what it has done to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. Society assumes that all women are the same, and not individuals in the society. Haney Peritz wrote “the text’s second movement wherein the narrator counterpointed her description of Jennie as the perfect housekeeper with a remark that the wallpaper had some kind of subpattern—a ‘formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design’”. This line in the story is a definition that the narrator uses to define those women herself. She sees them as ‘formless figures’ that have nothing more to them than society’s definition of them. In the story, Gilman wrote “it is like a woman stopping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (360). Talking about the women as if they are creeping along behind the wallpaper symbolizes the women “tip-toeing” around in Victorian society who are unable to truly express themselves. These women creeping could mean that they are walking around carefully, so that they don’t disrupt society’s definition of them.
The narrator also provides a definition of herself in the story. She uses the place that they are staying to symbolize herself. She describes it as “beautiful place”, but “the place has been empty for years” (Gilman 355). I believe that the narrator is very comparable to this place. She has felt empty for many years as she has gone through this “illness”. The room that the narrator is confined in has also been used as a symbol to symbolize the situation of women in patriarchal society (Kasmer). The definitions and symbols that the narrator uses to describe women and their situation show that the narrator is battling this patriarchal society, and that it is not just a “mental illness”.
The wallpaper that the narrator studies and obsesses over symbolizes the women in this society trapped inside the wallpaper, “the bars of society”. It seems the “prison” isn’t just confinement, but torture as well as indicated in the descriptions of the wallpaper: “there is a recurrent spot where the pattern looks like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (Gilman 357) and “it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be” (Gilman 361). The wallpaper also represents the writing itself, in that the wallpaper is “an unheard of contradictions” and the narrator also claims that writing would do her good, but it also tires her (Haney-Peritz). The women in this society are stuck in these contradictions within themselves. The narrator feels one way, but then again is almost convinced to feel another way that society tells her. John tells the narrator that things like writing would only make her tired, and she needs to rest. The narrator admits that writing does her good, but John has convinced her that it will only tire her. This patriarchal society has confused the narrator in that she doesn’t know what is good for her and is contradicting herself. The narrator can tell that something is wrong with herself, but because of society, she thinks it is only an illness, when it is really not being able to be herself. It’s not just the narrator that is trapped. “I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of” (Gilman 359). This line tells me that there are all types of unique women behind this wallpaper, but are all trapped in the same way. The narrator writes, “round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!” (Gilman 362), which is symbolic of the women going through their “routine” that society has given them. The narrator is focused on figuring out what the pattern means and is “determined that nobody shall find it out but myself” (Gilman 361). This wallpaper gives her a sense of control over something that she has never experienced before. The narrator then rips the wallpaper off the walls and people say that it is the construction of women’s discourse, but I agree with Ford when he states that it is more of a retreat from this discourse (311-312). In the way the narrator describes the wallpaper, it is obvious that it is about women battling inequality and being trapped by the patriarchal bars of society. Dickinson and Gilman both have battled against a patriarchal society, and use a lot of the same examples to show that these writings were during a time of feminism. They both show how women were behind the shadows of men, had a definition to go by, and used other symbols in the writings to show that this was against a patriarchal society. Both pieces of literature are written during a time period that women were to be only wives and to submit to their husbands entirely. Many women during this time period were imprisoned within their own marriage, just like the women in these pieces of literature.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston, Little Brown: 1924. Web. 29 June 2013.
Dressman, Michael. “Empress of Calvary: Mystical Marriage in the Poems of Emily Dickinson.” South Atlantic Bulletin. 42.1 (Jan. 1977): 39-43. JSTOR. Web. 1 July 2013.
Finch, A. R. C. “Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes.” PMLA. 102.2 (Mar. 1987): 166-176. JSTOR. Web. 1 July 2013.
Ford, Karen. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Women’s Discourse.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2 (1985): 309-314. JSTOR. Web. 30 May 2013.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. Shorter 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2010. 354-365. Print.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. UMI Research Press, 1989: 95-107. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 May 2013.
Kasmer, Lisa. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Symptomatic Reading.” Literature and Psychology. 36.3 (1990): 1-15. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 May 2013.
Saputri, Ardika. “A Feminist Literary Criticism of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I’m Wife; I’ve Finished That’.” She Uban’s Chronicles. Web. 1 July 2013.