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

Repression of Women Exposed in The xanthous Wallpaper The short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a brilliant description of the plight of the prim woman, and the mental agony that her and many other(a) women were put through as treatment for depression when they found that they were not satisfied by the feel they had been given. In the late nineteenth century when the Yellow Wallpaper was written, the office 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 hoary society where they were expected to be demure and passive, supportive yet un interrogatorying 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 somebody and most importantly, conserving her sanity (Wagner-Martin 51). In this Victorian society the boredom and effort of affluent women fostered a morbid cult of hypochondria - female invalidism- where it became popular and stock-still appropriate for women to fall into bed at the slightest provocation with a vile headache or nerves (Ehrenreich 92-93). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the Yellow Wallpaper (among other things), said of this phenomenon that American men have bred a race of women weak teeming to be handled as invalids or mentally weak enough to infer that they are-and like it. (93). As a result of this female invalidism the respected physician, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell true a rest cure which depended upon seclusion, massage, electricity, immobility and overfeedi... ...ublications, 1997. 1-15. ---The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman An Autobiography Univ of Wisconsin Press, reprint edition 1991. Hedges, Elaine R. Afterword. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1973 37-63. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 9. Detroit Gale 1988. Schopp-Schilling, Be ate. The Yellow Wallpaper A Rediscovered pictorial Story. American Literary Realism 1870-1910. 8 (1975) 107-108. Shumaker, Conrad. Too Terribly 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 put across to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit St. James Press, 1994. 981- 982.