The book The Yellow Wallpaper portrays the values and social traditions of Victorian women, their problems, and their social position in society. Gilman attempts to demonstrate care and love by freeing women from the individual home and developing a unique approach to domestic tasks, such as child-care, As a feminist writer, Gilman portrays that most women suffer from the low social position and lack of family support caused by social values and ideals. Gilman reveals how the civilizing mission she envisioned in her fiction and nonfiction writing is bound up with Victorian ideology.
Thesis
Using a unique title, Gilman symbolically portrays that women suffer from psychological disorders caused by lack of attention and care, and the constant pressure of secondary roles and unimportance.
The title is extremely important for the entire work because it has a symbolic meaning related to the whole story. Hume underlines “From a present-day clinical point of view, Gilman’s narrator’s contradictory feelings of depression and empowerment are consistent with our contemporary ideas about mental illness;” (3). Yellow was widely used in insanity hospitals to treat psychological disorders and neurasthenia. Also, it is possible to interpret wallpaper as a background of the story which symbolically limits the world of the narrator and her freedom (Hume 3). The narrator describes this color in detail: “The color is repellant, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (Gilman 13). The role of the title is crucial because it unveils the drudgery forced upon women in the home reduced them to the level of the savage “squaw.”
Reinforcing gender differences of this type would, according to Gilman, impede both the advancement and degradation of Victorian society. Yellow underlines insanity and psychological disorder suffered by the main character: “There are always new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously. It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman 28). Moreover, women could then assume a socialized maternal role that helped transform everything from child-care to cooking (“On Feminism….” n.d.). Symbolically, Gilman unveils that marriage during the Victorian period was a real prison for women which prevented them to obtain equal positions and equal rights with men. The narrator tried to prove her dignity and social value believing that men and women are alike.
Gilman vividly portrays the male attitude towards family, a wife, and her illness. Women were perceived as a secondary creatures in contrast to superior men. Gilman depicts that a male physician neglects complaints of his wife treating them as “temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 10). Using this theme, Gilman underlines that strenuous efforts were made at the insistence of the women to overcome the invidious distinctions between male and female illness in order to achieve equality. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency -what is one to do?” (Gilman 10). This remark shows that middle-class women were sedulously set apart from the world, general, of intellect. This represented a marked reversal of attitude and custom. Aristocratic ladies had actively managed their family’s household and estates.
In the eighteenth, there had been plenty of middle-class businesswomen, engaged in a variety of occupations from fan making and hairdressing to catering, and, as widows, often carrying on their husbands’ trades, whatever these might have been—bookselling or hatmaking (Hume 3). The nation’s increasing wealth and the growing complexity of the mercantile economy required a special kind of managerial expertise which supposedly was a peculiarly masculine gift. the make attitude is reflected in their position in society and perception of the wife and her problems. Hume supposes that “the sources of the narrator’s madness range from an oppressively patriarchal culture or medical establishment to motherhood and the institution of marriage” (Hume, 3). Gilman underlines that male occupations and social roles determine the structure of society and the position of women.
“It seems that she has carefully crafted her sentences and metaphors to instill a picture of lurid and creepy male oppression. The reference to old things and the past is a reference to outdated practices and treatment of women, as she considers the future to hold more equality. By setting the story in this tone, Gilman alludes to practices of oppression that, in her mind, should be relegated to the past” (On Feminism, n.d.).
Gilman persuades readers that women have enough strength to fight for their freedom and liberty, free will, and independence. Women understand that equality would lead to racial advancement and the uplifting of civilization to a new and higher stage of women in society. In linking the moral uplift of society with the role of women, Gilman not only reiterates her analysis but also reveals how that message of the social uplifting of women contains freedom and liberation (Hume 3). It was, in any event, an unnaturally sheltered and restricted existence the middle-class girl and woman-led; little wonder that neurasthenia was as prevalent as the personal records of the period reveal it to have been (“On Feminism….” n.d.). At the very same time they portrayed “ideal” specimens of Victorian girlhood and womanhood, wrapped in an aura of virtue and innocence, Gilman studied the nonconforming woman—the outsider, the prey of ambition,—and her various motivations, pride, possessiveness, sexual hunger, intellectual aspiration, or whatnot.
Gilman ends the story with the following words: “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Now, why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall so that I had to creep over him every time!” (Gilman 36). It is possible to say that the revered cluster of Victorian domestic virtues served as a norm, a vulnerable assumption upon which writers frequently mounted an outright or covert attack on the unrealities and perversions of the prevailing womanly ideal, the myth of domestic accommodation and tranquility (Thomas 1998). They included sobriety, thrift, cleanliness of person and tidiness of home, good manners, respect for the law, honesty in business affairs, and, it need hardly be added, chastity. Thus, these virtues did not allow women to obtain an equal social position with men and gain recognition (Hume 3).
For the narrator, freedom was equally important, to invite the approbation of others. It was like living in a state of grace on earth. Adding weight to these moral qualities was seriousness, a bent of mind often designated by that word in Victorian society. Less dour in its implication but equally descriptive of the middle-class moral ideal was the be earnest, which, while not excluding humor and innocent pleasure, alluded to the same zealousness and above all sincerity in the pursuit of presumably worthwhile personal and social goals (Hume 3). On the whole, most of the personal qualities included in the code of respectability were solid and incontrovertible. Of themselves, sobriety, thrift, industriousness, and the rest are admirable.
But as a group, they had several deficiencies which rendered them vulnerable to criticism then and even more so today. “The yellow wallpaper is symbolic of the Cult of True Womanhood, which binds women to the home and family. As in the case of Charlotte Gilman, women were constricted to the set parameters that men determined” (Thomas 1998). One was that many of these values contained the seeds of their own negation: carried too far, a virtue could easily become a vice. Chastity, or, more generally, strict notions of behavior, could, and notoriously did, turn into prudery; insistence upon unremitting diligence became an unwholesome obsession with work for its own sake; seriousness became pompous solemnity and bigotry; earnestness and manliness became priggishness (Thomas 1998).
In sum, Gilman unveils that women occupied secondary roles in society but fought for equal rights and personal freedom. From earliest childhood, consequently, on all levels of society, both at home and at school, the Victorians were accustomed to strong values and traditions. The woman depicts that her husband and brother do not treat her like other patients supposing that her illness is a child’s fake. Society did not give rights to women to act on their own and limited their will and actions.
Works Cited
Gilman, C. P. Yellow Wallpapers. Feminist press, 1996.
Hume, B.A. Managing Madness in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Studies in American Fiction, 30 (2002), 3.
On Feminism and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Gilman. n.d. Web.
Thomas, D. The Changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1998. Web.