Feminist Themes in Literature

Gilman's fiction and nonfiction must be located in the context of the American Progressive Era's rampant and vigorous American industrial capitalist expansion supported by patriarchal social values and reinforced by the politics of nascent American economic imperialism. The Progressive Era of the early 20th century, like the latter half of the 19th century, was also informed by the women's suffrage movement and the zeal among activists for the enlargement and institutionalization of women's rights more generally. Indeed, much of the women's rhetoric of the period was retained by the modern feminist social critique.

In Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, sociologist Thorstein Veblen captures the second-class status of middle-class women as equivalent to the status of slaves, being "exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. T

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is a phony one. Gilman's commentary in Women and Economics is thematically consistent with the experience of the young wife in "The Yellow Wallpaper" who is not a full partner in her own marriage. Apparently because of prolonged postpartum depression, the wife feels disaffected from home and family. But her repeated attempts to be heard in her own household--ironically a well-intentioned one--gradually push her toward madness. Doctor-husband John decrees that his dear wife is to have perfect rest. He chooses the (ugly) room in which such rest will take place. She dislikes the wallpaper, but it will not be changed because John is sagacious enough to realize that, apropos of women's impulses, change will never end, first "the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on" (Gilman 44). John is solicitous in the project of taking care of his wife--but not of his wife as a person. He explains what she needs and should do and seems to wonder what is the matter with her that she thinks she doesn't agree with what he's doing: "You know the place is doing you good," he says to his "blessed little goose" (Gilman 44). That is father-daughter, not husband-wife talk. John's profession am
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Approximate Word count = 1549
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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