Historical and Feminist Context
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in The New England Magazine at the end of the 19th century, is considered one of the key feminist works of that time and nowadays, as it illustrates women’s attitudes toward mental and physical health in the 19th century (Hamilton). This bibliography aims to present the novel’s main idea and significance in the modern-day world and specify the writer’s key features in her work.
Narrative Perspective and the Rest Cure Treatment
The story is told in the first person, and it is a collection of diary entries written by a woman whose doctor’s husband, John, decided to rent an old house for some time. The couple leaves the other rooms empty and moves only to one on the first floor (Lin-na). As a part of the treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden to do the hard work, only to sleep well and have a good rest to treat herself from what her husband calls “temporary nervous depression,” a mild hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common among women at the time (Lin-na). The narrator devotes many of her diary entries to describing the wallpaper in the room, explaining how its color is disgusting to her and that she can even feel the smell of the paint.
Symbolism of the Wallpaper and the Descent into Madness
Everything that surrounds her makes the woman feel uncomfortable and gives the vibes of depression instead of recovery. She describes how the longer a person stays in a bedroom, the more the wallpaper changes. Moonlight even emphasizes the effect of the worst side, making the woman feel disgusted and uncomfortable (Lin-na).
The patterns become increasingly intriguing to the reader and to the woman herself. Soon, she finds the figures and postures on them and concludes that a woman crawls on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must free the woman on the wallpaper, she tears the remaining paper off the wall.
Mental Illness as Resistance to Patriarchal Authority
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she depicts the narrator’s madness as a way of protesting against professional and social oppression against women. It gave the impression that male husbands and doctors were acting in their own interests, but women were portrayed as mentally weak and fragile (Ghandeharion and Mazari). Women’s rights advocates of the time believed that the “outbreak” of this mental instability was a manifestation of their failure to deal with the problems they were facing in the controversial modern society. Women were unallowed to write, ultimately creating identity (Hamilton). Gilman demonstrated how writing became one of the few ways for women to express themselves without being pushed and unappreciated.
Writing, Identity, and Women’s Oppression
The whole composition was created as one of the most evident proofs of male control of the 19th-century medical profession, and not only that. Throughout the story, the narrator offers many tips to help her get better, such as exercise, work, or communicating with the outside world (Hamilton). However, her ideas are immediately rejected with the help of stereotypical points of view and with no opportunity to establish opinions about her condition. This interpretation is based on women’s lack of rights and freedoms at the time.
Annotated Bibliography
Ghandeharion, Azra, and Milad Mazari. “Women Entrapment and Flight in Gilman’s ‘the Yellow Wallpaper.’” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 29, 2017.
The work examines the issue in the work from a feminist perspective. In addition to the specific example of this work, it also raises the question of the need to fight for women’s rights and its relevance in today’s world.
Hamilton, Carole L. “The Collegial Classroom: Teaching Threshold Concepts through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘the Yellow Wallpaper.’” CEA Critic, vol. 77, no. 2, 2016, pp. 211–22.
The article looks at the work as a teaching method. It describes the methods of analysis that should be considered when studying the work “The Yellow Wallpaper” and what stylistic techniques were used.
Lin-na, Ni. “A Non-Feminist Reading of “the Yellow Wallpaper.” International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), vol. 4, no. 12, Dec. 2015, pp. 233–37.
This paper shows how the plot of the work is spelled out, pushing back not only on the issue of feminism, but also as a set of issues. In addition, it is a quintessence of the previous two works on which the analysis of the work was based.