The Oppression Of Women In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The struggle for women’s rights became prominent in the nineteenth century, when women started to resist the act of being housewives and bearing children and allowing that to define them. Most people ignored the fight because there was so few participating. Instead people turned a blind eye to the difference of importance in gender roles and continued to live life as the people before had. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman displays the struggle women have in finding equal footing with men because society is reluctant to change the way gender roles are used in everyday life.
The oppression of women and the idea that men are the superior gender are stereotypes that are difficult to overcome throughout history. The narrator’s husband, John, controls her by him convincing her he is having her stay in the room upstairs, even if she despises it, in order to benefit her health and her “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 1). He prescribes her with the illness and takes her out into the country because he thinks it is what is best for her. John constantly speaks down to the narrator as if she is
The wallpaper contains a woman and multiple faces of women trapped in it. The narrator is obsessed and watches it constantly, even though the “pattern is torturing” (12), as it represents the women that were trapped by the people in their lives throughout many generations. The wallpaper represents that women are trapped by the men mentally and cannot express their ideas. The women trying to escape society’s norms failed because “nobody could climb through [the] pattern” (16). The pattern is society’s norms and people are hesitant to change the way they live and how people are viewed. The women in society are expected to act a certain way and doing so they fall into the pattern and become trapped as the women before them