Study Questions on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892 (2024)

reveals the unquestionable supremacy of the patriarchal convention at that time. Absence of female identity and the imminent failure of any attempt of female self-assertion were inescapable. However, in her story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides an instance of female emancipation and resistance to the dominant male law. The narrator's psycho-mental journey proves to be a process of dismantling the myth of the patriarch through self-liberation even while still confined. To start with, the narrator is a woman who suffers from what we call postpartum depression. As a result, her husband and physician confines her to a rest-estate in which she is forbidden any physical or mental effort, starting from taking care of her newly-born child to writing and socializing. As a matter of fact her husband John, representative of a whole social system, has a complete control over her body and brain. He considers the thoughts of his wife not only as invalid, but also as unnecessary and "laughs at [her]" (Gilman). Hence, he forbids her from thinking. Moreover, he deprives her from the most natural female roles to be a wife and a mother. Likewise, even the confinement to the very restricted and basic function of a female of getting married, giving birth and raising her children, is denied.

https://lewislitjournal.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/faculty-feature-the-yellow-wallpaper/

Turkish Studies - Language and Literature, 2021

Ecological problems have always existed in the world so far, and they seem to exist for a long time in the future. Various approaches emerged in literature to raise awareness against ecological problems. Ecofeminism integrates ecology and feminism into one and seeks to draw parallels between the exploitation of the environment and the exploitation of women. Ecofeminism, which emerged as a new literary-critical approach trying to put the women and the ecological problems in the centre of the universe, occupies an important place together with other ecocentric approaches. Recently, most studies have focused on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's contribution to feminism. In literature, the relative importance of feminism has been subject to considerable discussions, and few studies have investigated the works related to women's issues from an ecofeminist perspective. The specific objective of this study to analyse Gilman's short study, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) from an ecofeminist perspective. This study uses a descriptive qualitative and library research method in data collection. Data were collected from primary and secondary sources. While primary data was obtained from Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", the secondary data was collected from various books, journals and research articles. The study consists of two main parts. In the first part of the study, some brief information about feminism and ecofeminism and the historical background of these two literarycritical approaches will be given. The second part of the study will focus on Gilman and her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and this work will be handled from an ecofeminist perspective.

Cognizance Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies

This literary study uses Feminist Criticism and Psychoanalytic Criticism, specifically it looks into the characters, themes, and symbolisms to reveal the issues of gender oppression that are reflected in the story. The method of literary research used is qualitative method of discourse analysis. In addition, the related literature and studies are utilized to support the textual investigation. Through the lens of the literary theories used, the issues that are found in the characters, are done through by looking into its portrayal and implication. Hence, the portrayal and implication of all the characters in the story are highly showing the presence of gender oppression. For the analysis of themes, it explores the significant issue about gender oppression that is happening inside the marriage wherein the husband turns to be dominant while the wife becomes inferior. On the other hand, the symbolisms reflect the essential representation of gender oppression experienced by the women in ...

International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies , 2018

The paper analyzes Charlotte Parkinson Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper from a feminist perspective. It reveals the reasons behind the existence of this literary text in the late 19 th century. For this purpose, the paper presents Gilman's life as the background of the study, and then, it tries to find a link between her life as a woman and the life style of narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. In this way, the paper theorizes the arguments with reference to both Gilman's life, and the sequences of events in The Yellow Wallpaper. During the lifetime of Gilman, majority of women suffered from being subject to men and male dominance which confined them into homes. Thereby, they were forbidden from their rights to work or to get knowledge or even to speak their minds. So, being affected by the miserable condition of women around her, Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in order to defend women in her society. Thus, the paper tries to demonstrate that Gilman uses her text as a tool to encourage and normalize women's resistance to the patriarchal rules in their society that confined, oppressed, and dehumanized women. Gilman uses her protagonist in the text as a role model for women in her society who were oppressed, and left helpless. Throughout the text, Gilman tries to walk in the shoes of those women who never got a chance to be what they are and got broken at the end. Thus, the paper exposes the dystopian life style of the narrator so as to reach into a conclusion that the narrator's story is not more than Gilman's story which is presented to stand for women's story in the late 19 th century. The phrase "Helpless Angel" in this paper, thus, is symbolically presented so as to symbolize the helpless women in Gilman's time. The phrase is driven from one of the main patriarchal terms of the age which was The Angel in the House.

Odisea 13, 2013

The focus of this article will be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s thoroughly anthologized story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Beyond the patriarchal perception of the narrator as progressively falling into madness, this study aims to prove that, in line with some feminist readings of the story (e.g. Haney-Peritz, 1986), the unnamed female protagonist consciously elaborates a mad language and discourse as part of her strategy to fight patriarchy from within. A careful study of this language will break the reader’s initial illusion that the protagonist is mad and will show how she finally embraces the rational discourse of medicine to perpetrate her revenge.

Elh, 2002

This paperfocuses on locating Gilman in the nineteenth-century society and discusses largely woman’s condition and their space. Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper” sufferspatriarchal biases and strives to find her identity and independence.In this paper, my aim is to relate the themes of marriage, independence and feminine ideals to patriarchy, andto tracehow the narrator lacks identity, which she tries to find behind the wallpaper and attempts to rescue herselffrom the male-dominated society. It also underlines to what extent women can actually liberatethemselves and achieve their rights to speak and to express.Furthermore,the paper would also examinethe patriarchal biases of the nineteenth-century medicine which prescribed women to undergo “rest cure” that actually confined them within the societal norms ratherthanto grow out of it

Many writers are focused on the theme of feminism to write their short stories or novels. In some of the short stories where feminism is the main theme, I would mention: The Story of an Hour, The Revolt of the Mother, A Respectable Woman, and The Yellow Wallpaper. These short stories highlight the role of women in the family and their relation with the other members. In this article, I want to focus on the role of women in marriage and their relation with the husband and the children in the short story written by Mary W. Freeman entitled The Revolt of the Mother and in The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I am going to make a comparison and contrast between the role of the woman in The Revolt of the Mother and in The Yellow Wallpaper by mentioning the role of women in marriage. There is a difference between the woman of the nineteenth century and the women of today. There are many aspects that are different and most of them have changed for better. One question to be made is whether the role of women in the marriage has changed for better or worst. This is a question that will receive an answer after studying and comparing the role of women in the society, the changes that she has undergone and the effects of these changes. Some of the changes can be considered as a progress of the society but some others can be considered as the loss of some moral issues.

Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 2013

The aim of this presentation is to show how Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin manipulate temporality to foreground their themes in The Yellow Wall-Paper and The Story of an Hour in the light of Gerard Genette’s theory of time. Both stories present female characters oppressed by the patriarchal authority in the marriage and their attempts to liberate themselves from this oppression. The aim is to find out how the gender of the author or protagonist in the narration can affect the time of narration. Gerard Genette’s theory of time (order) is applied to these short stories in order to confirm that the theme of the story affects the time of narration regarding women’s status in the narration. The results are in agreement with feminist narratologists who believe that the female authors use techniques of time in the narration purposefully to resist or negotiate with patriarchy in the process of women’s liberation.

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH, 2021

The life of the typical American women in the late 1800s was strictly confined to the four walls of a house. For a wife, marriage, husband and family were the destiny. She had no legal political right or voice in public sphere. They were not supposed to involve in any intellectual pursuits but only in domestic chores like cooking, sewing, cleaning etc. The condition of women in any class (upper, lower or middle) was more or less same. Charlotte Perkins Gilmanand Kate Chopin were noted American writers of nineteenth century. Both writers outrageously expressed their strong views on women, marriage and sex. They were revolutionaries of their time. This paper is going to analyse how Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” depict typical public expectations about marriage and women of late 1800s. It also distinguishes the representation of women and wife in the nineteenth century patriarchal American society.

Modern Language Quarterly, 2017

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novels and short stories are notably didactic, but they are not merely socioeconomic treatises in disguise. Her unabashedly mundane and pedantic literary style embodies a self-consciously modern aesthetics of didacticism that pervaded US literature in its years of transition between realism, naturalism, and modernism and that characterized the subgenre of sociological fiction. Gilman's 1910 novel What Diantha Did models the social rigor that sociological novelists considered essential to the art of fiction. What Diantha Did tracks the creation of a system of kitchenless homes in California and the subsequent emancipation of women from forced domesticity. Gilman's prose reflects on, and even formally replicates, the drudgery and repetition she associates with household labor. Gilman proposes an analogy between novels and kitchens as genres of modern social life: both must be collectivized and liberated from the archaic, the personal, and the masculine.