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The Yellow Wallpaper and Feminism

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In the 19th century, male chauvinism was the dominant social idea in America. In the domestic environment, women had to obey to men. Women could not violate what men asked them to do and this oppressive environment had important impacts on how women perceived themselves and their roles in society. It was very unfair to all the women at that period of history. Nevertheless, with the gradual emergence of feminism, some women began to advocate the gender equality and resist the male chauvinism. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a classic feminism masterpiece. It was a story about a married woman who suffered from mental depression and was rebellious to her controlling husband. Her husband, who was a physician, had the family move to a house in order to treat her wife’s nerve problem with a rest therapy. With the requirement to rest and do nothing, she developed delusion over the physical environment of the room. The yellow wallpaper in the room became her obsession and source of fear in imagination. Although some people considered this story as a psychological or horror story, it definitely was a story of feminism because the woman in the novel struggled to break away from her husband constraining all her activities, and she was seeking freedom and independence for her own life. Therefore, the Yellow Wallpaper exposed the darkness of the male chauvinism, and the author tried to awaken women to seek freedom. She promoted the consciousness of independence in order to achieve women’s individual freedom for expression and choice. First of all, Gilman presented the domestic environment as a prison for women and this oppressive environment could be embodied in the old nursery house. In the story, the narrator was arranged to move into a house in order to have the fresh air and good rest for her nerve problem. However, this big house looked very “strange” and “queer”. From the beginning, the woman felt there was “something strange about the house.”(239) When her anxiety about the place grew, she began to notice the similarly “strange yellow” of the wallpaper in her room. Therefore, although the house was supposed to be a resting place for the narrator to recover from her sickness, it turned out to be a place that she never felt like home. As a matter of fact, it was more like a prison than a home. When describing the details of the house environment, she mentioned the house used to be a nursery for children and “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.”(239) She went on to detail about how ugly and repellent the wallpaper was: “the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.”(240) Here the attention was given to the color of the wallpaper. All of these words, such as “repellent”, “revolting”, “unclean” and “faded”, indicated how the narrator perceived t

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