charlotte perkins stetson the yellow wallpaper

'He is very careful and loving,' she writes in her journal, 'and hardly lets me stir without special direction.' Her words also sound as if they have been rehearsing what she's been told. The narrator in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper begins with trying her very hardest to become the doting, domestic wife her husband seeks as she initially seems to believe he knows best. This idea of the “angel in the house” (814) is used by many Feminist theorists derived from Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem ‘The Angel in the House’ describing the ideal Victorian women and the domestic sphere they are meant to exist in. In this, they characterize the nineteenth century as a time when “female purity was represented not by a Madonna in heaven but by an angel in the house” (814). Throughout Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ we see links to Gilburt and Gubar’s ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, but by writing it in the form of almost a horror story Gilman brings to light how horrifying male oppression can be and the devastating effect it can cause and serves as a reminder for this. In a work of fiction, the main character, or heroine, personifies the social struggle against the patriarchy.

For a text to be a feminist text it must be written by a woman, and it will point out deficiencies in society regarding equal opportunity, and the reader will typically be aware of this motive in the text.

Early readers read the story as a shocking horror and it wasn’t until the rediscovery of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in the early 1970s that it was appreciated as an indictment of Victorian patriarchy. It follows a woman’s deterioration at the hands of her husband’s prescription of the ‘rest cure’ which is ultimately detrimental to her recovery. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 and has since been described as ‘An American Feminist classic’ (Lanser).

Charlotte perkins stetson the yellow wallpaper