Essay Example on Women during the 19th century

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The Yellow Wallpaper Sojourner Truth once said If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down these women together ought to be able to turn it right side up again Women during the 19th century were not treated as equally as men During this era women were domesticated thought to be submissive and attend to all household needs In the The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman it reveals the psychological tale of woman during the nineteenth century Gilman conveys the distinction between the functions of the female and the power of a male with a prestigious position The Yellow Wallpaper simply shows the subordination of a pregnant who is trying to project the importance of self expression In the beginning of the Yellow Wallpaper the narrator Jane automatically shows the oppression of her marriage with her husband John If a physician of high standing and one's own husband assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with the one but temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do 297 


This quote shows the powerful respected voice of her husband s You can conclude that Jane disagrees with her diagnosing but has no power to change the situation Another situation where John is portrayed as the authority figure is when Jane asked to go to Cousin Henry and Julia house and he said no Jane was forced to write in her journal about the situation Dear John He loves me dearly and hates to have me sick I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit with Cousin Henry and Julia 302 Gilman portrays John to be this father like figure to Jane She is forced to be surrender herself to her husband The Yellow Wallpaper shows the gender division between the relationship of the husband and the wife The narrator Jane was kept in a childish state of ignorance because her husband john was the dominant figure She describes him as John is practical in the extreme He has no patience with faith an intense horror of superstition and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures 297 John s assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to patronize and dominant Jane all in the same while he is manipulating her in believing she's getting better Jane is forced to act like a child unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal 



She wrote and dear John gathered me up in his arms and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head 302 John treats Jane like a child rather than a significant other In every attempt to express her concerns she fails The importance of self expression plays another important role in the Yellow Wallpaper I am not certain Jane is married to John however she is forced to be passive partner which ultimately drives her insane Her documentation of events is her way to escape the feeling of being the less dominant figure Unfortunately John forbids her to write Gilman is characterizing Jane s personality I did write for a while in spite of them but it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it or else meet with heavy oppression 297 The narrator is forced to obey all her husband s rules Jane is forced to hide her anxieties and her fears in order to save the image of a happy relationship and try to make it seem like she is fighting against her own depression In her journal she writes about the Yellow Wallpaper that is surrounded in the room that she is forced to be confined in Jane describes this wallpaper as the following It is the strangest yellows that wallpaper It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw not the beautiful ones like buttercups but old foul bad yellow things 305 Throughout the story Jane becomes obsessed with this wallpaper The Yellow Wallpaper comes to focus on women who are desperate for freedom and liberty from men 



The wallpaper represents the structure of family and the tradition of women as Jane finds herself in The yellow wallpaper itself is symbolic of the mental screen that men attempted to place on women during early nineteenth century The color yellow is often associated with sickness or weakness and the writer s mysterious illness is a symbol of man's oppression of the female sex At the end of the The Yellow Wallpaper Jane is forced to release the women who are behind the wallpaper Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus just shriek with derision 307 Jane has successful accomplished her goal she sets free all the women who were trapped behind the wallpaper Throughout the short story The Yellow Wallpaper symbolizes women were portrayed to be submissive and who were forced to listen to their husbands Jane is a primary example of how women are forced to be the passive towards their husbands Women of the nineteenth century played the role of men being in charge and now in the twenty first century women can do just about anything as men



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