Imprisonment of Women Exposed in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpa

Imprisonment of Women Exposed in The Yellow Wallpaper When asked the question of why she chose to salve The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman claimed that experiences in her own life dealing with a nervous condition, then termed melancholia, had prompted her to write the short story as a means to reach and save other people from a similar fate. Although she may have suffered from a similar condition to the narrator of her illuminating short story, Gilmans story cannot be coined merely a tale of insanity. Insanity is the vehicle for Gilmans larger comment on the atrocities of social conformity. The main character of The Yellow Wallpaper comes to recognize the inhumanity in societys treatment of women, and in her awakening to this, visualizes her torment in the faded yellow wallpaper that hangs in her chambers, her jail. The unnamed narrator of the tale is purposefully left field unnamed the narrator could be any wife, any mother, any woman. Gilman transforms the hysterical, insane female of early 19th century literature into genius. The first striking shape that readers of The Yellow Wallpaper are presented with is not that of a room, it is not of the house, but of the character of John, the husband. John is described as a man of a mulish and extreme nature (246). His presence throughout the tale provides for the narrators motive. John refuses to accept her wifes condition he does not believe that there is anything truly wrong with her. If a physician of high standing, and ones own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical disposal - what is one to do? (246) The narrator is possessed by her hus... ...ion. Sven Birkerts. Boston, Massachusetts Allyn and Bacon, 1992. 387-400. Haney-Peritz, Janice. Monumental Feminism and Literatures Ancestral House Another Look at The Yellow Wallpaper. Womens Studies 12 (1986) 113-128. Johnson, Greg. Gilmans Gothic Al legory Rage and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall 1989) 521-530. King, Jeanette, and Pam Morris. On Not indicant Between the Lines Models of Reading in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (Winter 1989) 23-32. Knight, Denise D. The Reincarnation of Jane Through This - Gilmans Companion to The Yellow Wallpaper. Womens Studies 20 (1992) 287-302. Rigney, Barbara Hill. Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist young Studies in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood. Madison, WI The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.