Yellow Wallpaper
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is partly autobiographical and it illustrates the fight for selfhood by a women in an oppressed and oppressive environment. In the story, the narrator is not allowed to write or think, basically becoming more dysfunctional as she is entrapped in a former nursery room where bars adorn the windows and the bed is nailed to the floor. In this story there is an obstinacy on behalf of the narrator as she tries to go around her husband’s and physician’s restrictions, however, there is no resisting the oppressive nature of her environment and she finally surrenders to madness even though it represents some kind of selfhood and resistance because it allows her to escape her oppression, “She obsesses about the yellow wallpaper, in which she sees frightful patterns and an imprisoned female figure trying to emerge. The narrator finally escapes from her controlling husband and the intolerable confines of her existence by a final descent into insanity as she peels the wallpaper off and bars her husband from the room” (Gilman, 1999, 1).Gilman herself suffered from post-partum hysteria and was treated by a famous doctor of the era, one who prescribed his famous “rest cure”, the same cure the female narrator cannot tolerate and defies in The Yellow Wallpaper. In this story the narrator remains nameless and there is good reason for it. She feels as if she has no identity or control over obt
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Of course, she defies him at every step of the way. She pretends she is asleep when she is not, she studies the wallpaper when he is sleeping or away, and she writes, an act he has forbade her, when he is gone. According to educator John Dewey this is the right approach for her to gain her wholeness, her mental balance and striving toward fulfillment, “When the common experience which ought to be the birthright of all human beings is broken by barriers of ignorance, class-prejudice, or economic status, the individual thus isolated loses his status as a civilized human being, and the restoration of his wholeness is possible only by reestablishment of the broken lineage” (Dewey, 1954, 9).
We see this broken lineage restored in the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper when she discovers the trapped part of herself, a part those around her try to rob from her by defining her role for her. When she rips down the wallpaper, she is freeing the trapped part of herself that has kept her from her birthright or common experience mentioned above by Dewey, “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but Me—not alive!” (Gilman, 1980, 17). The narrator has gained a triumph by freeing the trapped woman in the wallpaper, that piece of h
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Approximate Word count = 1739
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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