Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpaper essays

Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Perkins Gilmans short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader is treated to an intimate portraiture of developing insanity. At the same time, the storys first person narrator provides shrewdness into the social attitudes of the storys late Victorian time period. The story sets up a sense of gradually increasing distrust between the narrator and her husband, John, a doctor, which suggests that gender roles were strictly defined however, as the story is just atomic number 53 representation of the time period, the examination of different sources is necessary to better encounter the nature of American attitudes in the late 1800s. Specifically, this essay will crush the representation of womens roles in The Yellow Wallpaper alongside two other texts produced during this time period, in the effort to discover whether Gilmans depiction of women accurately reflects the cabaret that produced it. The Yellow Wallpaper features an unnam ed female narrator who serves to exemplify the expectations situated upon women of the time period. As we are told early on, she is suffering from a dying(p) condition (Gilman 1). While we are not told the specific nature of this condition, we do discover that the cure prescribed by John, the narrators husband and doctor, entails taking phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise while intellectual work is absolutely forbidden until she is sanitary again (Gilman 1). This poses a particular problem for the narrator, due to her desire to write, which she continues to do in spite of them, and causes her to hide her writing to avoid facing sober opposition (Gilman 1). The treatment to which t... ...Mitchell, seems all the more plausible. After all, her socially-defined role as the dutiful wife and mother was being constrained by her softness to withstand the treatment foisted upon her by a man trained to rebuff his patients feelings . As a woman, she had no socially sanctioned way to react to the problems she faced. Rather than wonder, as John does throughout the story, why his wife is congruous increasingly deranged, readers of this story should only wonder why, given the mores of the time period, in that respect werent far more stories like it. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. face ci Homepage. August 1999 . Mitchell, S. Weir. The Evolution of the Rest Treatment. English 101 Course Packet. Chico Mr Kopy, 1999. Power, Susan. The Ugly-Girl Papers. English 101 Course Packet. Chico Mr Kopy, 1999.