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

Imprisonment of Women Exposed in The chicken Wallpaper When asked the incertitude of why she chose to write 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 try and save other people from a similar fate. Although she may have suffered from a similar condition to the cashier of her illuminating short story, Gilmans story cannot be coined merely a baloney of insanity. Insanity is the vehicle for Gilmans larger comment on the atrocities of social conformity. The briny character of The Yellow Wallpaper comes to recognize the inhumanity in societys manipulation of women, and in her awakening to this, visualizes her torment in the faded yellow paper that hangs in her chambers, her jail. The unknown narrator of the tale is purposefully left unnamed the narrator could be any wife, any mother, any woman. Gilman transforms the hysteric al, insane pistillate of early 19th century literature into genius. The first striking image that readers of The Yellow Wallpaper are presented with is not that of a room, it is not of the house, only if of the character of fundament, the husband. John is described as a man of a practical 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 authentically nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do? (246) The narrator is feature by her hus... ...ion. Sven Birkerts. Boston, Massachusetts Allyn and Bacon, 1992. 387-400. Haney-Peritz, Janice. Monumental Feminism and Literatures Ancestral House some other Look at The Yellow Wallpaper. Womens Studies 12 (1986) 113-128. Johnson, Greg. Gilmans Gothic Allegory craziness and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall 1989) 521-530. King, Jeanette, and Pam Morris. On Not Reading 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 Novel Studies in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood. Madison, WI The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.