Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". The Effects of Patriarchy on a Woman's Mental Health:
by
klernz (student)
Lerner 3
Krista Lerner
Professor Hadley
English 231
14 June 2012
The Effects of Patriarchy on a Woman's Mental Health:
An Analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is a story of a woman in the early twentieth century who suffers from a nervous depression disorder and is forced to succumb to her husband, John's, therapeutic treatment only to lose herself to insanity. More generally, the story represents the controlling role that males can have over women in society and how the inability of women to overcome this control can have negative impacts on themselves. The narrator is seen as a symbol for all women who have involuntarily fallen as prisoners in a male-dominated society. Gilman expresses a feminist approach to the mental effects of a woman's oppression, but with further interpretation, it is the combination of both the narrator's physical confinement due to her husband's control and her weakness against fighting this suppression which forces her to insanity.
John's decision to keep his wife in isolation as a treatment for her depression is the primary cause that contributes to the narrator's impending mental demise. The narrator tries voicing her opposition for a more esthetically pleasing room that “opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window” but does not prevail (61). The room she is confined in, and the wallpaper specifically, becomes less of a decorative piece and more like an object of obsession to her. Perhaps due to her lack of social interaction and growing illness, the narrator realizes what that “thing was that showed behind, that dim sub pattern, and is sure it is a woman" (66). This vision of an person within the inanimate wallpaper is clearly an indication of the mental effects of her solidarity. The idea the narrator describes when she sees the woman “take hold of the bars and shakes them hard” is one that symbolizes all of women's suppression in a male-dominated society (68). As the narrator becomes more involved with this woman, the more she realizes the dangers of her own oppression. Her obsession with and the several attempts at freeing the woman from the wallpaper, mirror her descent into her own madness and separation from reality.
