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Gilman's Critique of Intellectual Patriarchy

          Feminist authorship has been an apt forum for protest throughout literary history.  By its very principle, the notion of a female writer flies in the face of conventional gender expectations, with a prohibitive patriarchal perspective long depriving women of educational, social and occupational opportunities.  In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1899 narrative, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator employs an almost absurdly servile sentiment and an emotional bluntness that, in concert, constitute an articulate critique of society’s rampant sexism.  The narrator, a woman who suffers from boredom and depression, is quite clearly an well-adjusted and self-aware individual who is, therefore, prone to introspection, ambition and intellectual inquisitiveness.  These are all qualities that were regarded in her time as distinctly male, with the socially proscribed roles of women providing no outlets for such inclinations.  By satirizing the cruel condescension and arrogant disregard of men toward these impulses, Gilman submits a sharp and well-conceived criticism of gender inequality.

          Her marriage serves as a perfect vessel for exploration of the imbalance between the sexes, with the extremity of her husband John’s chauvinistic proclivities starkly highlighting the story’s central thrust.  John is a caricature of the haughty, dismissive and unconsciously malicious 19th century male, demonstrating callously the ill-treatment to which female emotion was subjected.  A physician, John recommends that his wife sleep all day in order to revive her ‘nervous’ health.  The narrator, for at least the first half of the piece, characterizes frequently her depression, her misgivings about her life and her grievances with the ‘big room’ all as personality faults, encouraged in this belief by her husband.  She remarks, with no small degree of irony, that John “is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.”

          Such special direction includes an insistence that she cease thoughts of a career, adventure, visits with stimulating acquaintances and especially writing.  These prescriptions only drive the woman further into depression, invoking a sense of guilt over the inconvenience of her condition to her loving husband.  She laments at one point, “I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!”  It is the author’s intent to draw a response of disgust from the reader here, effectively forcing a recognition of the institutionalized prejudices which barred women from even expressing themselves emotionally, let alone growing according to their wishes.  The narrator’s description of her sister-in-law provides a telling foil to her own crushing malaise.  Noting it in explicit contrast to herself, the woman observes that “she is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!”  This provides a useful point of inflection as to the limitations truly placed upon women.
 
          When the metaphor of the yellow wallpaper comes into play, shapeless and revolting but quite visibly falling away from the walls, its representation of female docility and domesticity is clear.  Here is where the author not only cites a problem, but offers a solution.  First, it is reflected in her obsession with a figure, theretofore unseen, now becoming gradually more apparent within the tasteless wallpaper pattern.  The narrator notes that “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”  Soon, the woman that has consented to her husband’s poor medical advice, disinterested emotional partnership and intellectual disrespect is no longer. 
 
          Fixated on the figure behind the pattern, the narrator begins to see her everywhere from her isolated spot in the room.  In response, she commits to tearing the yellow wallpaper recklessly aside, declaring symbolically a liberation for women forced to hide behind a hideous and repetitive pattern of bland, unimaginative and unfulfilling lives.  When her husband, so stolid and emotionally inconsiderate through the story’s duration, faints at the site of his emotionally disturbed wife manically shredding the room’s wallpaper, there is a crucial shift of roles.  The husband has shown himself to be vulnerable, and his subjugated wife is for the first time beginning to feel the power of self-determination.

          The author’s message may still have a great deal of relevance, more than a century after its composition.  The narrator’s emotional dilemma is perhaps still more common than one might hope or imagine.  Detained in a cyclical pattern of uninspired banality and its resultant disruption of motivation, the woman in Gilman’s story offers an exemplar of resistance.  For the reader, her husband’s infuriating absence is ultimately countered by a rewarding confrontation in which he is perhaps finally made to understand that which he refused to see for so long.  In the resolution, Gilman has provided an allegory which is equally compelling in its treatment of man and woman.