![]() Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” in historical context, Jane Thrailkill points out that the nineteenth-century medical establishment did not understand how to deal with women’s mental health issues, often misdiagnosing a whole host of disorders as female hysteria (545). The narrator says, “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?” (3). ![]() The story focuses on the narrator’s “nervous condition” as she slowly loses sense of reality, the whole time being totally misunderstood and misdiagnosed by her husband, a doctor who is unable to understand a woman’s psyche and who believes the best treatment is for her to confine herself to her room and rest. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman depicts a marriage in which both the narrator and her husband are trapped in their assigned roles and are doomed because of this. Gilman’s short story is a warning to her readers about the consequences of fixed gender roles assigned by male-dominated societies: the man’s role being that of the husband and rational thinker, and the woman’s role being that of the dutiful wife who does not question her husband’s authority. ![]() “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a tale of one woman’s descent into madness, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s response to the male-run medical establishment and the patriarchal structure of the nineteenth-century household. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |