Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s Short Story the Yellow Wallpaper

Ana Maria Gutierrez

21 February 2016

Writing 102

Sara Olsen

and what can one do?

Many scholars have analyzed the significance behind Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and have come up with infinite theories behind the real meaning of this outstanding literary work. Many previous critics have considered this to be a feminist piece of work, in this essay I further their argument that the story symbolizes gender issues. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman interrogates the nature of the narrator’s illness by exploring the gender roles in the nineteenth century. The story is written by a woman that was part of the nineteenth century society and her literary work confronts the stereotyped roles of the husband-wife relationship at that time. The structure of the authors work is very understandable and direct, with short paragraphs and sentences which best represent the mental state of the narrator, as she writes about herself she slowly approaches the reader to support her beliefs.

The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper blames her husband John of managing to worsen her illness because of his gender misconception.  Scholars like Beverly Hume and Sandra Gilbert along with Susan Gubar, have examined the sexist meaning behind the short story by analyzing the role of the secondary characters in the story. Hume states “John is mechanistic, rigid, predictable and sexist” (478), she shares how Johns character has no patience whatsoever with her ill wife and does not take her anxiety about the wallpaper as concerning. Hume argument does make a connection with the gender inequality expressed throughout the short story, in base of her argument against john, we can conclude that John as a male physician believes to be superior to his wife and atomically right about everything. On the other hand, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate why Gilman attempted to blame the gender roles in a subtle way. Gilbert and Gubar`s theory presents that females in the nineteenth century were not easily welcomed in the literature canon and therefore had to hide the real meaning and their female concerns behind their stories. Women in the nineteenth century were struggling to be heard and they wanted share those unique experiences that you could only understand through a women’s perspective, as Gilbert and Gubar remark, women would revise male genres and then write their own stories in disguise. These scholarly texts are useful to analyze the influence of gender roles behind the short story and the impact it had on the main character as well as the author. The narrator herself expresses “John is a physician perhaps that is one of the reasons I do not get well faster” (10). Although she does not directly blame her husband, it is clear that the narrator often considers her husband’s chauvinism personality to be a source of her illness.

Gilman`s narrator leads her readers to the significance of the yellow wallpaper of transmitting a feeling of being trapped due to her role as woman. Hume as well as Gilbert and Gubar compare the role of women and men during the nineteenth century. Beverly Hume remarks how Gilmans narrator was impacted by the gender stereotypes and the ignorance of her husband of his rigid method of locking her in a room covered in a wallpaper rather than optimizing for a more suitable option of letting her out of the house in general. Nevertheless, Hume implies that Gilman`s primary concern is not patriarchy, which I highly disagree, since the author expresses through subliminal messages that characters like her husband and Jennie would often lower her self-esteem because of their need of authority. Gilbert and Gubar also analyzing the gender roles, made an argument of how women were struggling to define themselves in the nineteenth century. They mention how women had “little sense of viable female culture” (292) and were often feeling trapped and restrained of communicating freely. Gilbert and Gubar`s argument leads back to the patriarchy of gender expressed throughout the short story and the urge of Gilman`s narrator to be set free from her usual environment. In the short story the narrator mentions how she saw a woman behind bars that wanted to get out, just like the woman in the wallpaper the narrator felt trapped and was looking for a way out.