Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". Discovering the depiction of female oppression in a short story of the 19th Century (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,2, Bielefeld University, course: The Gothic, language: English, abstract: In the living years of the author of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", female oppression has always been a great problem. Women were suppressed, treated like an item and had to live under their husband's rule. As society became increasingly modernized, women, who suffered from a mental illness were prescribed the rest cure, such as the author of the short story in which she reports her experience of the treatment and thus a woman's place in her society.

An interpretation of her story might still be relevant today since gender roles and especially the behavior towards women, remain a widely discussed topic and is not limited to a certain period in time. Therefore, analyzing the short story and the author's attitude towards the medical community of her time will still be worth it.

In order to elaborate on how the oppression of females in the 19th Century is represented in "The Yellow Wallpaper", this paper seeks to analyze the short story from a feminist perspective with a focus on the ways in which gender relations are depicted. Before taking a closer look at the short story, I will shortly examine a woman's position in the 19th Century, elaborate methods of the medical community performed on Victorian women and explain the rest cure in more detail. Then I will analyze and explain my interpretation of the short story by focusing on essential parts which chart the progression of the narrator's madness and the cause of it. In the end I will apply the discussed gender relations to the short story and I am going to discuss, if the narrator's progression of madness, represents her growing rebellion against the prevailing gender relations at that time and whether the used narrative techniques emphasize the visionary break with patriarchy.