Yellow Wallpaper Essay Essay Example for Free

discolour paper Essay Essay(Full bod Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman) American short story writer, essayist, novelist, and autobiographer. The following entry presents criticism of Gilmans short story The lily-livered Wallpaper (1892). The short story The Yellow Wallpaper, by nineteenth-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was first published in 1892 in New England Magazine. Gilmans story, based upon her own experience with a rest reanimate for rational illness, was written as a critique of the medical treatment prescri furnish to women suffering from a condition then cognize as neurasthenia. The significance of The Yellow Wallpaper as a feminist text, however, was not acknowledged until the critically acclaimed 1973 reissue of the story by the Feminist Press. Henceforth, The Yellow Wallpaper made its way into the canon of feminist literature, becoming a staple of university womens studies courses. Since 1973, The Yellow Wallpaper has been reissued by several publishers in various volumes modify by literary critics. It was also adapted to film in a 1992 made-for-television production by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Plot and Major CharactersWhile in her twenties, Gilman was diagnosed with a mental disorder called neurasthenia or ill at ease(p) prostration. She was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the leading authority on this illness. Mitchells rest cure, prescri furrow mainly to women, consisted of committing the patient to bed for a period of months, during which time the patient was fed only mild foods and deprived of all mental, physical, and genial activityreading, pen, and painting were explicitly prohibited. Gilman once introduced that the rest cure itself nearly drove her insane. The parallels betwixt Gilmans experience and that of the vote counter in The Yellow Wallpaper are evident in the story. The Yellow Wallpaper is structured as a series of secret diary entries by an unnamed woman, a modern wife and new mo ther whose debilitating mental condition has prevented her from caring for her infant. She and her husband John, who is a doctor, imbibe rented a house in the country, in which she is to take a rest cure. The narrator is confined to an up the stairs means that was once a childs nursery but has been stripped of all furnishings and decor, except for a bed that is nailed to the floor, bars over the windows, and a garish yellow wallpaper. She describes the color and pattern of thewallpaper in an florilegium of distasteful ways. The narrator becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper and begins to imagine that a woman is trapped laughingstock it. The storys finale finds the narrator creeping around the edges of the room and tearing the wallpaper in ragged sheets from the walls in an attempt to free the woman she believes to be trapped behind it. When her husband unlocks the door and finds his wife and the room in these conditions, he is appalled. Ive got out at last, she explains, And Ive pulled off most of the paper so you cant rank me back He faints, and she continues to creep around the room, crawling over her husband as he lies unconscious mind on the floor. Major ThemesSeveral major themes emerge from the narrative of The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilmans story expresses a general concern with the role of women in nineteenth-century society, particularly within the realms of marriage, maternity, and domesticity. The narrators confinement to her home and her feelings of being dominated and wrong by those around her, particularly her husband, is an indication of the many domestic limitations that society places upon women. The yellow wallpaper itself becomes a symbol of this oppression to a woman who feels trapped in her roles as wife and mother. Gilmans story merely expresses a concern for the ways in which society discourages women of creative self-expression. The narrators urge to express herself through writing is stifled by the rest cure. Yet, the creative i mpulse is so strong that she assumes the risk of secretly writing in a diary, which she hides from her husband. Finally, The Yellow Wallpaper addresses issues of mental illness and the medical treatment of women. While the narrator is clearly suffering from some kind of psychological distress at the beginning of the story, her mental state is worsened by her husbands medical opinion that she confine herself to the house. The inadequacy of the patriarchial medical profession in treating womens mental health is further indicated by the narrators fear of being sent to the famous Dr. Weir, proponent of the rest cure treatment. Critical ReceptionAt the time of its initial publication in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper was regarded primarily as a supernatural tale of horror and insanity in thetradition of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1920, The Yellow Wallpaper was reprinted in the volume Great Modern American Short Stories, edited by William doyen Howells, who described it as a story to freeze our blo od. Elaine R. Hedges, author of the afterword to the 1973 version, praised the work as one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman who directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship. Since that time, Gilmans story has been discussed by literary critics from a broad range of perspectivesbiographical, historical, psychological, feminist, semiotic, and socio-cultural. Nearly all of these critics acknowledge the story as a feminist text written in protest of the negligent treatment of women by a aged society. Furthermore, the story has sparked lively critical discussion and ongoing debate over the symbolic meaning of the wallpaper, the uttermost to which the story represents an effective feminist statement, and the implications of the storys ending. Critics continue to debate the question of whether Gilman provides a feminist solution to the olden oppression that is exposed in the story, while acknowledging the end uring significance of The Yellow Wallpaper as both(prenominal) a feminist document and a literary text for contemporary readers.