Repression of Women Exposed in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpape

Repression of Women Exposed in The yellowish Wallpaper The light story The sensationalistic Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a brilliant commentary of the plight of the Victorian woman, and the mental agony that her and many other women were lay through as treatment for economic crisis when they found that they were not satisfy by the life they had been given. In the late nineteenth century when the yellow Wallpaper was written, the role of wife and mother, which women were expected to adopt, often led to depression or a so-called hysteria. Women of this period were living in a patriarchal society where they were expected to be demure and passive, certificatory yet unquestioning of their husbands, and good mothers to their husbands children. The conflict for women in the society thus became a question of how to be all of these things while still conserving herself as a person and most importantly, conserving her sanity (Wagner-Martin 51). In this Victorian society the boredom and confinement of affluent women fostered a morbid cult of hypochondria - female person invalidism- where it became popular and even appropriate for women to fall into bed at the slightest pique with a sick headache or nerves (Ehrenreich 92-93). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the yellowness Wallpaper (among other things), said of this phenomenon that American men have bred a slipstream of women weakly enough to be handled as invalids or mentally weak enough to pretend that they are-and like it. (93). As a result of this female invalidism the respected physician, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell developed a rest cure which depended upon seclusion, massage, electricity, immobility and overfeedi... ...ublications, 1997. 1-15. ---The funding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman An Autobiography Univ of Wisconsin Press, Reissue edition 1991. Hedges, Elaine R. Afterword. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1973 37-63. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 9. Detroit Gale 1988. Schopp-Schilling, Beate. The Yellow Wallpaper A Rediscovered Realistic Story. American Literary Realism 1870-1910. 8 (1975) 107-108. Shumaker, Conrad. Too awfully Good to Be Printed Charlotte Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper American Literature. 57 (1985) 194-198. Treichler, Paula A. Escaping the Sentence diagnosis and Discourse in The Yellow Wallpaper Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature. 3 (1984) 61-77. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Yellow Wallpaper. Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit St. James Press, 1994. 981- 982.