" One of the central aspects on her perception of the role of women was her emphasis on social standards and norms and particularly the importance of the role of the mother in society. "Motherhood is not a remote contingency, but the common duty and the common glory of womanhood" (Gilman1898)
" One of the central aspects on her perception of the role of women was her emphasis on social standards and norms and particularly the importance of the role of the mother in society. "Motherhood is not a remote contingency, but the common duty and the common glory of womanhood" (Gilman1898)
At first blaming the yellow wallpaper for her illness, and in the end, embracing it, "now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell" (Gilman pp)
In a 2002 article in "Studies in American Fiction,' Beverly Hume cites a passage from Gilman's "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-Paper," which Gilman wrote five years after her recovery from the ill effects of S. Weir Mitchell's rest cure treatment (Hume pp)
The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell" (Gilman pp). Mary Roth writes in the December 2001 issue of "Mosaic," that the yellow wallpaper is symbolic of cultural imperialism (Roth pp)
While he is content to let her do her own thing, she is not supportive of her and even chastises her on her ability as a mother. He humiliates her by asking, "If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?" (Chopin 7)
She is, at least initially, trying to somehow maintain her subjectivity despite male interdiction." (Herndl 130) Writing in her journal therefore becomes her way of rebelling; of asserting herself against a world that refuses to listen to her innermost feelings and perceptions
resonated with a faint sense of that disturbance so prevalent in Gilman's tale because arabesque is an uncentred and indeterminate style of decoration. "(Roth) in other words the wallpaper becomes a physical expression of her own dislocation of self and loss of identity
She says, "John is a physician, and perhaps -- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) -- perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick!" (Gilman)
Symbolically, the emptiness which the narrator perceives is related to her own mental emptiness, for the house has apparently been "dejected" by others in the past, due to its queer atmosphere; she too has been "dejected," especially by her husband who "does not believe I am sick" and equates her depression with "a slight hysterical tendency" (Hunt, 171). A little further on in the text, the narrator admits that the emptiness of the house "spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care -- there is something strange about the house -- I can feel it" (Hunt, 172), an indication that the house itself may be responsible for the narrator's "nervous condition" (Gilman, 1980, 167), or at least may exacerbate such feelings
. A steady brainache that fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress" (Hunt, 184)
Lost in the text, she finds her own madness written there. (Jacobus 231) This is a further link between the character and the author
Her mother gave her little affection, believing she would never know the pain of rejection if she never experienced love. (Vosberg para