Women Uniting to Defeat Patriarchy. A Feminist and Gender Critical Reading of 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Introduction to Literature, language: English, abstract: The question that characterizes the beginning of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) is one that many women in the nineteenth and twentieth century will likely have posed to themselves. 'What is one to do?' Gilman's narrator asks repeatedly, when, as a woman in the late nineteenth century, one has no choice but to assume the role of the helpless wife and mother under the oppression of male authority. The Yellow Wallpaper challenges this stereotypical image of womanhood as well as the unequal relationships between women and men that come along with a male dominated society and its ideology of 'masculine rationality vs. feminine irrationality' (Rodriguez Salas 2012). As a result of being diagnosed with, what was then called, 'nervous prostration' - generally regarded as hysteria - and prescribed the 'rest cure' (Gilman 1935), Gilman also explores and brings to light the problematic views on and treatment of mental health in the nineteenth and twentieth century. At the time, hysteria was primarily associated with passivity, the result of leading a 'softer life' and having an overactive imagination - all stereotypically feminine behaviours - and was thus diagnosed primarily in women (Kahane 1995: 10). In her autobiography Gilman talks about how she was not allowed to write, paint or have more than 'two hours' intellectual life a day' and how she was supposed to 'live as domestic a life as possible' (Gilman 1935), all of which are elements that are closely reflected in the protagonist's diagnosis in The Yellow Wallpaper.