The Gender Politics of Work Exposed in The Yellow Wallpaper :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

The Gender Politics of Work Exposed in The yellowness Wallpaper The literature of the nineteenth century cataloged the social, economical and political changes during its period. through it many immature concerns and ideologies were proposed and made their journeys through intellectual spheres that have endured and unploughed their relevance in our own period today. The literature, sometimes quite overtly, introduced the issues arising with the changes in parliamentary procedure specifically due to the industrial revolution. In this mixture of youthful ideas was the question of womens labor and functions among this rapidly changing troupe. American authors as head as Victorian authors, like George Gissing and Mabel Wotton, explored these issues somewhat explicitly during this period. In America, Louisa may Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed these issues in short stories with strong implications of the dangers of unfulfilled or trivial labor available to women. With the emergence of an industrial working class that arrived from the farms and countryside new theories and ideologies about the political economy began to appear. Karl Marx, a political philosopher during this time, introduced the idea of craziness of labor. His theory proposed that labor has the ability to create a acquittance of reality in the laborer because the laborer himself becomes a commodity or object due to the nature of work. In terms of the roles of women it can be argued that the effect is even greater due to the limited choices of work available. This written report is expressed in literature through the writings of Gilman and Alcott. In Charlotte Perkins Gilmans, The white-livered Wallpaper we be introduced to characters that can be argued to be representational of society in the 19th century. The narrator, wife to a seemingly prominent limit, gives us a vision into the alienation and loss of reality due to her need of labor. I in addition contend however that this alienation can also be attributed to her infantilization by her husband, which she willingly accepts. John laughs at me, of course, but whizz expects that in marriage (1). The narrator here realizes her place among the order of society and even notes that it is to be expected. She is aware of her understanding that things between she and her husband are not equal not only because he is a doctor but because he is a man, and her husband. The narrator is forbidden from work and captive to rest and leisure in the text because she is supposedly stricken with, evanescent nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, that is diagnosed by two her husband and her brother, who is also a doctor (1).