Introduction
In modern civilizations, the rising fear of solitude among women is undermining social order. There is a need for assistance, especially among women with domestic obligations. This essay investigates the relationship between insanity and neglect as described in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. The primary objective is to learn from Jane’s experience to improve women’s quality of life in modern society. Due to their primarily domestic obligations, women are the most susceptible to social isolation in most civilizations. The health and socioeconomic development of families, institutions, and nations must empower women. As such, people need to be allowed to work in an environment of their choosing for connection and mental stability. In establishing empowerment, women should be able to achieve economic independence from chauvinistic men.
Summary of the Relevant Parts
In The Yellow Wallpaper, Jane is seen more clearly than the figure of a lady behind the pattern’s bars, who moves at night and remains static throughout the day. Jane feels inferior to John and often worries, “If I do not pick up faster, he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall” (Watson and Moreton 271). She becomes obsessed with isolation and the room’s furniture and walls, which depict a desire for a relationship or connection. She is drawn to the wallpaper, which has taken center stage in her obsessive-compulsive disorder and psychosis. For instance, Jane suspects John and his sister, Jennie, are also investigating the wallpaper’s secret.
Personal Interpretation
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the author represents the narrator’s imprisonment and the imprisonment of all 19th-century women by society. Jane, the victim imprisoned behind the wallpaper, is gradually distressed by her confinement. She feels misunderstood, noting that “there are things in that paper that nobody knows but me” (Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings 703). She is a victim of societal standards that limit her behavior based on gender stereotypes and male chauvinism. She stares at the yellow wallpaper as a barrier, but she eventually awakens. Jane realizes that she is not imprisoned by the wallpaper but by her husband. She has gotten sad due to her lack of independence.
Through the symbolism of this lady on the walls, The Yellow Wallpaper demonstrates how a woman’s sadness leads to insanity. Luckily, Jane can leave the wallpaper by revealing that freedom is the only cure to all the madness. Jane cannot recognize her full potential since she is stuck, often protesting that “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings 623). She will discover that she is up to the task once she adjusts the wallpaper and liberates herself. The only way she can be free is to remove herself from John’s life.
In this tale, Jane represents the narrative’s suppressed ego, which she perceives as a prison inside her home world. The more the narrator examines this wallpaper, the more a lady begins to emerge. It further represents how women were seen throughout the 19th century, where married women were subservient. Jane is not fond of the relationship as she states, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (Gilman, The yellow wallpaper 13). In the protestations, both the lady and the wallpaper have profound significance. From Gilman’s perspective, Jane’s experience is an excellent narrative demonstrating many women’s experiences with society-instigated isolation.
The Feeling of Helplessness and Psychosis
As evidenced throughout the novel, John never takes Jane seriously, although Jane finds herself emotionally dependent on her spouse. She often wonders why she always remains in the room, yet there is little attention to her suffering. IN expressing distress, Jane says that “it is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose” (Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings 673). She appeared disillusioned when she said that John believed it was beneficial for her to be restricted in the room (Watson and Moreton 271). She believes her spouse is more important than she is, which was how society saw males in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout the majority of the 19th century, mothers were supposed to be nurturing toward their children, and postpartum depression was seen as a transient nerve disorder.
Relevance in History
Jane’s psychological distress questions society’s perception of women as only mothers and spouses in light of the supplied evidence. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the treatment of women in the early 1900s provides a glimpse of some of the errors that define male chauvinism. Jane admits to her sense of neglect, admitting that “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings 713). Jane was a victim of women’s psychological and physical enslavement under their husband’s authority. In The Yellow Wallpaper, John is portrayed as a domineering husband who disregards his wife’s wishes as unreasonable.
In the early 19th century, the responsibilities of women in American culture were cooks, wives, mothers, and general homemakers in a mainly rural context. Families were significantly more prominent and depended on the women to provide children to conduct free physical work on the land to preserve the family income and welfare (King 119). They were supposed to be subordinate to their spouses and fathers on all issues and had little political, legal, and social equality. With the advent of the First World War and the industrial revolution, however, the need for employees to manufacture commodities exceeded the number of males available in the United States. Consequently, women got admission into the workforce, which expanded to create gender equality in the United States forever. These experiences put women at risk for mental disorders such as sadness, anxiety, paranoia, and psychosis.
Similarly, the quality of obligations accessible to rich women was as deleterious to their mental health. The few available employment consisted of being a maid or a servant for an aristocratic household, which required the same work ethic they used while caring for their families. The patterns were exacerbated by the fact that women received little education and had few job development opportunities. In addition to the long hours and difficult working circumstances, pregnant women were expected to continue working until their due date and return to work virtually soon after delivery. Due to tiredness and the substandard medical procedures of the period, most women had an extremely poor life expectancy and essentially worked themselves to death. However, throughout most of the 20th century, there were significant gains in opportunity for women when technology offered options for women and a culture that pushed for women’s rights.
Alarming Trends in Contemporary Workplace
Despite the progress, the 21st century continues to expose women to mental illness, partly attributable to the nature of women’s roles in the workplace and the rising trend of remote work. There are fears that women executives are leaving their organizations because they confront obstacles in the workplace that make advancement more difficult. Trends reveal that more are likely to face humiliating microaggressions, such as experiencing their judgment challenged or being confused for someone more novice. Today, women support employee well-being and foster inclusivity to a greater extent than in the past, but their efforts are primarily unrecognized and undervalued.
Women leaders aspire to senior-level positions with the same frequency as males. However, many firms encounter contempt that undermines their authority and indicates that advancement will be more difficult. For instance, research indicates that women in leadership positions are far more likely than men to have coworkers suggesting that they are unqualified for their professions (Kalev and Gal 259). The patterns indicate that women leaders are misidentified for subordinates twice as often as male leaders. These deficiencies must be addressed to improve employed women’s quality of life.
Recommendations for Action
On a larger scale, proposed initiatives need interventions that strategically enhance the quality of women’s efforts to achieve empowerment. Such interventions include enhancing women’s occupational, financial, and life skills and removing obstacles to social, political, and economic involvement. These tactics should attempt to increase women’s individual, group, and collective strength to combat inequality and oppression in individual relationships, families, and organizations. The activities should concentrate on economic and social empowerment with help in policy creation and advocacy campaigns on women’s rights.
Conclusion
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the contemporary experience of women in society. Jane’s experience depicts the narrator’s imprisonment and the imprisonment of all women of the 19th century by society and, to some degree, the current male-dominated society. Today, there is a correlation between such mental discomfort and psychosis and other psychiatric disorders. Recommended interventions include developing women’s educational, financial, and life skills and removing obstacles to social, political, and economic engagement. The intervention should bolster women’s individual, community, and collective strength to combat inequality.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings: The Yellow Wall-Paper; Herland; Our Androcentric Culture or, The Man-Made World by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing, 2021.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The yellow wallpaper.” 2022. Ryerson University, Web.
Kalev, Alexandra, and Gal Deutsch. “Gender inequality and workplace organizations: Understanding reproduction and change.” Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, 2018, 257-269.
King, Marjorie. “Exporting femininity, not feminism: Nineteenth-century US missionary women’s efforts to emancipate Chinese women.” Women’s Work for Women, Routledge, 2019, pp. 117–135.
Watson, Neil, and Fiona C. Moreton. “The Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Practical Neurology, 2021, 268-268. Web.