Free Yellow Wallpaper Essays: Womens Subordination :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

Womens Subordination in The Yellow Wallpaper The Yellow Wallpaper, indite in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study of insanity. It is a resentment story of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who imposes Mitchells rest cure.1 This short story vividly reflects a woman in torment. This story starts out with a psychoneurotic woman who is overprotected by her loving husband John. She is taken to a summer home to recover from a nervous condition. She is told to rest and sleep she is not even allowed to write. I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word. This shows how controlling John is over her as both husband and doctor. She is abruptly forbidden to work until shes well again. Here, John seems to be more than of a father than a husband. Like the husband in Ibsens A hiss House, John is being the dominant person in the marriage a sign of typical middle-class. Although the narrator feels desperate, John tells her that there i s no cause for how she feels she must dismiss those silly fantasies. In other words, John treats her standardised a child and gives her reason out to doubt herself. Of course it is plainly nervousness, she decides. She tries to rest, to do as she is told, like a child, but suffers because John does not commit that she is ill. This makes her feel inadequate and unsure of her own sanity. He does not roll in the hay how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. She feels that she should be a good girl and appreciate the protective know John offers to her. He takes all make out from me, and I feel so basely ungrateful not to value it more. . . . He took me in his gird and called me a blessed little goose. . . . He said I was his good and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well. In telling her to keep well, John just expresses more doubt about her having any real illness. She tries to discuss her feelings, but this brings only a stern reproachful look and she goes back to bed. Really penny-pinching you are better, John says over and over.