Women Entrapment and Flight in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Azra Ghandeharion,Milad Mazari

doi:10.14198/raei.2016.29.06

Azra Ghandeharion, Milad Mazari

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2016.29.06

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Abstract

This paper attempts to yield a critical reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), which is one of the pioneering feminist works of American literature. Attempts have been made at finding affinities between the specific characterization of the story and the stereotypical male and female figures as defined by patriarchy and in terms of traditional gender roles. The paper tries to draw on Lacan’s conceptions of language, Cixous’ ideas about écriture féminine, and Freud’s misconception about women’s conditions. Drawing critical attention to this information, the paper focuses on the main unnamed female character and the fact that her anonymity helps the readers, specifically female readers, to identify themselves with her.

Highlights

This paper aims at finding the feminist elements in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892); first, by suggesting how this story can be taken as a feminist work of fiction, and by trying to identify these feminist elements with
Alicante Journal of English Studies ideas discussed by the second-wave feminists, as referred to in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1974), ideas suggesting and criticizing the concept that women, as they are perceived by the patriarchal society, are nothing but the products of such a society, i.e., they are constructed in this fashion by men
An analogy is drawn between the logical, analytical and rational role conferred upon men, the narrator’s husband and other men mentioned in the story, as opposed to the subjective, irrational and illogical role bestowed on women, embedded in the characterization of the female narrator, and the fact that these roles are assigned by the patriarchy of the aforementioned society

Summary

Introduction

This paper aims at finding the feminist elements in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892); first, by suggesting how this story can be taken as a feminist work of fiction, and by trying to identify these feminist elements withAlicante Journal of English Studies ideas discussed by the second-wave feminists, as referred to in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1974), ideas suggesting and criticizing the concept that women, as they are perceived by the patriarchal society, are nothing but the products of such a society, i.e., they are constructed in this fashion by men.We attempt to shed light on the issue of traditional gender roles as an inseparable part of any patriarchal society, in particular the American society during the nineteenth century, the same society in which our narrator and her husband are living. It is noteworthy to say that her world of imagination is inexplicable only in terms of male dominated language and premises. These sexist gender roles and their inhibiting nature repressing women –the narrator is confined in a room resembling a prison– are represented by the pattern of the wallpaper in which there is a front pattern, implying the bars of a prison constructed by the society in which women are confined, and a sub-pattern resembling the body of a woman trying to escape, which embodies all the women restricted by the rules and regulations of a patriarchy

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