Summary: The Yellow Wallpaper
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Anastasia Soullier
Anastasia Soullier
Gonda 1
Charlotte Gonda
Mrs. Soullier
Composition II
22 July 2017
The Woman in the Journal
Women in this period of time did not fully have free will as it is written on the constitution. Women, such as Jane, was under the authority of their husband; John, a husband and a physician, refused to acknowledge Jane’s mental illness and forbid her to write and work actively to maintain his dominant control over his wife. Jane being trapped under the authority of
John’s caused her sanity to spiral downwards allowing him to have control.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote
The Yellow Wallpaper
“...not intended to drive people crazy, but save people from being …show more content…
crazy, and it worked” (Gilman “Why I Wrote The Yellow
Wallpaper” 793 ). Gilman purposely wrote the story, not for a horror entertainment pleasure, but to help out all the women that is under the rest cure, portrayed as an ineffective cruel treatment that was yet done by S.Wier Mitchell. Moreover, from the book of
Doctoring “The Yellow
Wallpaper”
,
Jane F. Thrailkill mentioned that, “Mitchell submitted Gilman to his celebrated rest cure that, in calling her for isolation, physical inaction, massage, mild electrical stimulation, and fattening, centered on the body as the site of health and disease” (Thrailkill 596). This event of
Gilman’s mirrors her classic short story
The Yellow Wallpaper
which we can symbolize Gilman as Jane. Furthermore, Thrailkill claimed that Gilman’s story “interpreted Gilman’s treatment at the hands of Mitchell as paradigmatic of the patriarchal silencing of women” (Thrailkill 596).
Anastasia Soullier
Anastasia Soullier
Gonda 2
The Yellow Wallpaper
opened as Jane starting to write in her journal. She then introduces
John as her husband and physician which she states that, “-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” 780). She later compared her brother to John as similar physicist. However as Jane writes her thoughts down, she describes to her readers that her journal is a dead paper. Jane’s journal is a must to be hidden especially to her husband due to his given rest cure treatment.
As the story progresses, Jane started to encounter with a wallpaper which became her source of entertainment; She began being fascinated towards an odd pattern, but her fascination then turns into something more bizarre which lead into her insanity. Jane discovers a trapped woman who is being resembled as a woman who is trying to release herself behind these patterns. Gilman represents this wallpaper as the structure of medicine and family that symbolizes it as a lifestyle that traps women, such as Jane and herself.
We see at this time of the piece that the woman is powerless against her husband. Men had the role to determine the actions that women makes such as seeing and discovering things.
Moreover, women was forbidden to express their thoughts and was forced to be passive. John was not just blinded by the situation, but abused his power preventing him to properly practice medicine. Women were represented to be stereotyped in the story by the limitations they have on themselves which “..damages the self-image by being forced to see themselves as Other, as less than them” (Schilb and Clifford 1096). Furthermore, Susan Lanser, who wrote
Feminist
Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics of Color in America
, said, “...the
wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance”
(Lanser 418).
Zoom
Pages
Anastasia Soullier
Anastasia Soullier
Gonda 1
Charlotte Gonda
Mrs. Soullier
Composition II
22 July 2017
The Woman in the Journal
Women in this period of time did not fully have free will as it is written on the constitution. Women, such as Jane, was under the authority of their husband; John, a husband and a physician, refused to acknowledge Jane’s mental illness and forbid her to write and work actively to maintain his dominant control over his wife. Jane being trapped under the authority of
John’s caused her sanity to spiral downwards allowing him to have control.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote
The Yellow Wallpaper
“...not intended to drive people crazy, but save people from being …show more content…
crazy, and it worked” (Gilman “Why I Wrote The Yellow
Wallpaper” 793 ). Gilman purposely wrote the story, not for a horror entertainment pleasure, but to help out all the women that is under the rest cure, portrayed as an ineffective cruel treatment that was yet done by S.Wier Mitchell. Moreover, from the book of
Doctoring “The Yellow
Wallpaper”
,
Jane F. Thrailkill mentioned that, “Mitchell submitted Gilman to his celebrated rest cure that, in calling her for isolation, physical inaction, massage, mild electrical stimulation, and fattening, centered on the body as the site of health and disease” (Thrailkill 596). This event of
Gilman’s mirrors her classic short story
The Yellow Wallpaper
which we can symbolize Gilman as Jane. Furthermore, Thrailkill claimed that Gilman’s story “interpreted Gilman’s treatment at the hands of Mitchell as paradigmatic of the patriarchal silencing of women” (Thrailkill 596).
Anastasia Soullier
Anastasia Soullier
Gonda 2
The Yellow Wallpaper
opened as Jane starting to write in her journal. She then introduces
John as her husband and physician which she states that, “-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” 780). She later compared her brother to John as similar physicist. However as Jane writes her thoughts down, she describes to her readers that her journal is a dead paper. Jane’s journal is a must to be hidden especially to her husband due to his given rest cure treatment.
As the story progresses, Jane started to encounter with a wallpaper which became her source of entertainment; She began being fascinated towards an odd pattern, but her fascination then turns into something more bizarre which lead into her insanity. Jane discovers a trapped woman who is being resembled as a woman who is trying to release herself behind these patterns. Gilman represents this wallpaper as the structure of medicine and family that symbolizes it as a lifestyle that traps women, such as Jane and herself.
We see at this time of the piece that the woman is powerless against her husband. Men had the role to determine the actions that women makes such as seeing and discovering things.
Moreover, women was forbidden to express their thoughts and was forced to be passive. John was not just blinded by the situation, but abused his power preventing him to properly practice medicine. Women were represented to be stereotyped in the story by the limitations they have on themselves which “..damages the self-image by being forced to see themselves as Other, as less than them” (Schilb and Clifford 1096). Furthermore, Susan Lanser, who wrote
Feminist
Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics of Color in America
, said, “...the
wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance”
(Lanser 418).