Question One (3)

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How The Yellow Wallpaper Show’s The Triumph of Women in a Male-Dominated Society
The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about how women are often trapped in domestic life where society dictates everything they do. The woman narrator of the story is married to her husband, John. The woman has a mental condition known as nervous depression. The story begins with her husband taking her for their summer vacation in n aristocratic estate in what seems like a haunted house. She is not allowed to leave the room, and neither is she allowed to write. She is always complaining that her husband, John, belittles her thoughts and illness and all her concerns in general. The narrator uses the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom to represent the chains of marriage that have held her captive in marriage. As such, I agree that the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an accurate depiction of a woman’s ultimate triumph over the restriction that has been put in place in a patriarchal society. This text analyses the use of texts from the story to prove this assertion.
`The society is designed in a way that reinforces the subordinate status of women in society. For this reason, the reader experiences the lonely and desolate life that the narrator is leading. Her husband, who is a doctor, does not do anything to assists her situation. Instead, he is exacerbating the problem by taking her through psychological horror. He isolates her in a very secluded part of the country and tells her not to leave the room. This compilation of stories openly criticizes the tale that the place of a woman is only at home. At the time of this writing, women were treated as second class citizens, where they were expected to stay at home and carry out domestic roles such as cooking and cleaning. However, things have changed in the 21st century, and women have become more independent. This text shows that gender division has prevented women from achieving their full potential because they were viewed as childish, foolish, and of low intellect (Gilman, 19). John sees himself as a superior being, and he uses that to dominate, misjudge, and patronize his wife thinking that he is helping her. On the contrary, this does not assist in improving the situation. John reduces the narrator to the point that she cannot stand up for herself because she is afraid of coming out as disloyal. Sadly, she has no say even in the smallest details that are happening in her life. That is why her mind often wanders into obsessive fantasy. She sees a woman who has been trapped behind the wallpaper in the bedroom and has been trying to break free. This represents the ties of patriarchy and domination that continue to force women into subordination in marriage and other sectors of their life.
Furthermore, the narrator is struggling to keep her mind in a state of relief. Without a doubt, any mind which is forced to become inactive is destined for destruction. The narrator is struggling with mental constraints, which are driving her insane more each day. Her husband is forcing her to suppress her fears and anxieties. Although she knows that staying secluded and alone is not good for her condition, she is forced to abide by what her husband says because she wants to save her marriage. She is forced to become completely passive, and her husband warns her severally against writing. He insists that she must use her self-control to suppress her thoughts. The narrator’s eventual insanity is a product of repressing her imagination instead of suppressing it.
Another deed that proves that the narrator’s husband John reinforced her condition of insanity is that he threatened that he would send her to Mitchell Weir at one point. This is the narrator under whose care Gilman had suffered a nervous breakdown; this was immediately after her family came to visit her during the holiday of the fourth of July. The visit left her very exhausted, and at this point, she had to adhere to her husband’s directives or risk being taken to an even worse place. Because writing is now off-limits, she longs for an imaginative and emotional way to let go of her feelings. She goes to the extent of keeping a private journal that neither her husband nor his sister knows. In the text, she refers to the journal as ‘relief to her mind”. This shows that although she has been forbidden from using writing, she longs to write because it helps her let go of her imagination.
In essence, the story of The Yellow Wallpaper is used to symbolize the ties that hold women and prevent them from being truly free. Worth noting, the narrators in this text use short stories to narrate her life at the hands of an oppressive husband who controls every aspect of her life. The women suffer from nervous depression because her husband, a doctor, has secluded in a house where she cannot go out or write down her imaginations. Her husband maintains that seclusion is what she needs to get better, while on the contrary, her condition seems to be worsening. This narrator represents hundreds if not thousands of women whose life is at a standstill because of societal expectations in a patriarchal society that only reinforces women’s subordinate status in society.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper: A Story. Oregan Publishing, 2018.