From your reading of Chapters 1, 2 and 26 of Jane Eyre, as well as any previous knowledge of the novel you might have, write about the links you begin to see between that text and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper
From your reading of Chapters 1, 2 and 26 of “Jane Eyre”, as well as any previous knowledge of the novel you might have, write about the links you begin to see between that text and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 for a number of specific purposes, including the author’s desire to raise awareness of the condition post-partum depression, from which she suffered, and to illustrate her views on the patriarchal nature and the inequality of Victorian society, particularly with relation to marriage. Perhaps most importantly, Gilman wanted to expose the flaws in the male treatments propositioned for post-partum depression and other similar conditions; treatments from which she herself ailed even more than from her ‘nervous disorder’ when waylaid in bed, much like the narrator of her novella – albeit to a less extreme end. By contrast, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” has no such definite intentions, but acts most prominently as a bildungsroman and a partial autobiography, which leads to a very different treatment of characters as constructs rather than as Gilman’s use of them as representations. While Brontë’s characters in “Jane Eyre” cannot be labelled with much more precision than Mr. Rochester’s standing as a Byronic hero, the characters in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are clearly intended for various purposes. The most obvious examples are John, the narrator’s husband, who embodies the Victorian male and the Victorian physician, and the narrator herself, who is intended to represent all of womankind subjected to the aforementioned Victorian male doctor.
A commonality between the two novels exists in their inclusion of characters exhibiting madness. There can be drawn many similarities between the two differing presentations, including an obvious physical manifestation of insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, as the narrator falls into madness – and particularly at the end of the novel when she has succumbed to it entirely – Gilman depicts her ‘creeping by daylight’ about her room, ‘crawling’ on the floor, ‘round and round and round’, after having the narrator herself earlier assert that ‘most women do not creep by daylight’, therefore proleptically implying something abnormal about herself. In “Jane Eyre”, this same physicality is used by Brontë in her presentation of Bertha Mason Rochester, as she is first introduced to Jane and to the readers ‘on all fours… like some strange wild animal’. Bertha is said to have ‘snatched and growled’, and ‘laid her teeth to [Mr. Rochester’s] neck’, which is an animalistic image also shown by Gilman when she has her narrator say she ‘bit off a little piece’ of her bed. Both authors are in this way very deliberate in creating the metaphor of their insane characters being animals; Brontë refers to Bertha through her narrator Jane as a ‘beast’, a ‘wild animal’ and a ‘clothed hyena’, and besides these more obvious physical links, there are also allusions to hair ‘wild as a mane’, ‘a fierce cry’, an instance in which the woman ‘bellowed’, and her ‘stature almost equalling her husband’, who is built athletically, so this comparison therefore reinforces Brontë’s presentation of Bertha as something of a behemoth – her name even bears a visual similarity to the words ‘beast’ or ‘bear’.
