The Sick Heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow Wallpaper

Ban Salah Shaalan

doi:10.36473/ujhss.v59i2.1089

Abstract

This study attempts to put Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s The yellow wallpaper in the context of contemporary theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s psycho-feminist scholarship The Madwoman in the Attic: The Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000). The two critics focus on the image of the imprisoned mad women in the attic like Bertha Mason, the mentally ill wife of Mr. Edward Rochester, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The image of the sick woman forced into domestic confinement of colors, shapes and wallpapers in an entire seclusion continued right into the twentieth century into the literary product of some of the women writers. According to Gilbert and Gubar, some of those women Victorian writers tried to give voice to those women descending into sickness and mental diseases throughout their endeavor to oppress their awareness of the inner creative power which comes as a part of their desire to accept the limited social role they are trapped in.

Highlights

The paper attempts to apply Sandra M
Images of the trapped and imprisoned self and soul searching for escape that recur throughout the works of some novelists like Charlotte Bronte‟s Jane Eyre continued to recur throughout some other nineteenth and twentieth century women writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Considering Gilbert and Gubar‟s Psycho-feminine theory, the following points can be concluded: First, most of Victorian women act as keeper of other women, Gilman‟s heroine acts as a keeper of the woman behind the bars of the wall paper

Summary

Introduction

The paper attempts to apply Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar‟s psycho-feminist theory introduced in their book The Madwoman in the Attic: Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000), through tracing the story of some of women writers‟ heroines. Such heroines yearn to escape entirely patriarchal society with all its difficulties of oppression, starvation and madness. As late Victorian, the narrator of Gilman‟s The Yellow Wallpaper objects to the yellowish wall paper of the room where she is to stay the whole summer Her objections do not indicate her modern taste, but rather refers to a more complicated issue entailed with personal choice of certain interior design pattern. The two critics decided, that the striking coherence they noticed in literature by women could be explained by a common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society.(2000, p., xii)

Discussion

Conclusion