Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s Short Story the Yellow Wallpaper

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The woman narrating the story of The Yellow Wallpaper without a choice has also been emotionally and intellectually violated by the environment John was encouraging. Both scholar texts by Hume and Gilber with Gubar explore the struggle the narrator was facing trying to define herself while being part of society in the nineteenth century. Hume connects the narrators failed attempt to define and cure herself with her husband, whose attitude toward her is calling her “a blessed little goose” (17) while holding on to his laughter. As Hume also points out, Gilman often presents how the narrator felt infringed upon emotionally and even physically, which would eventually drive her to madness. At the same time, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert base their argument on demonstrating that nineteenth century literary women felt that they had something to hide. Their argument implies that women writers in the nineteenth century would write stories with a character portraying their own anger. Relying on their theory, the narrator of the story was frustrated because of the attitudes and actions John had towards her based on his stereotypical perspective and so was the author herself. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also confronting the ineffectual domestic status that was expected of nineteenth century women to represent.

Gilman`s narrator was being oppressed in the environment John believed was the cure, when she was around her husband she did not behave as a her true self, rather she posed, and this as she claims, “makes me very tired”(24). She was struggling to define herself in the first place and posing when being with John was emotionally and intellectually tiring, finally she gave up and therefore opted to concentrate on what she saw behind the yellow wallpaper. The narrator was being influenced and controlled by John who portrayed the “ideal” man of a family and also by Jennie who represented the stay at home housekeeper female. By paying close attention to the story you can easily identify that the narrator simply desired to work and feel useful, but the recommended cure by her physician husband is to do nothing and empty her mind. Throughout the story you can identify that John often laughs at her and that the narrator casually acknowledges it stating that “one expects that in marriage” (7). This shows how influential the roles of stereotyped genders in this literary work are and the power of the author to transmit a second meaning portraying her own feelings and experiences.