Feminism in The Yellow Wallpaper
Feminism in The Yellow Wallpaper
When women begin to demand freedom and legal rights, the basis of feminism appears. Feminism refers to the women’s liberation movement (Kayahan, 1999: 9).
As a main branch of feminism, liberal feminism indicates women’s freedom and equality with men (Çaha, 2003: 563).
By determining the subjection women have experienced together with explaining their causes and consequences, feminist theories and approaches seek to find new policies and strategies for the emancipation of women (Tong, 2006 : 9-20). Liberal feminism is based on equal opportunity in education, women’s access to public sphere, and economic equality (Çakır, 2009: 438-446).
Equal opportunity in education means that there is no difference in intellectual capacity between men and women. Without making any distinction, opportunities of equal education have to be provided for girls and boys (Arat, 1991: 36-79).
Women can escape imprisonment in private sphere when they receive a good education, and can work in public sphere (Walters, 2005 : 121- 161). When women earn a living and gain power to determine their own l ives, they can get rid of being dependent on men (Dikici, 2016: 525).
In this context, women have the power and ability to stand on their own feet.
As liberal feminists Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill not only demand the rights of women but also argue the problems of women. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft considers women as a rational being and demands for women the education that improves the body and heart and develops conception (1988: 21).
According to Wollstonecraft, gender discrimination can be ended by giving women the same education as men. In The Enfranchisement of Women, Harriet Taylor criticizes that women are deprived of professions and are forced to do their maternal duties as wives and mothers. Taylor states that the reason can be explained as “it is so because men want so” (1994 : 192).
Thus, women’s dependence is not based on biological or physical reasons, but patriarchy. According to Taylor, women should receive education equally as men and be allowed to take role in the labour force. (Seiz and Pujol, 2000: 479). In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill states that he wants to make certain full equality between women and men (Mill, 1869 : 1).
They emphasize that women should get equal opportunities in education and gain economic freedom by accessing in public sphere (Alkan, 2018: 37-8). Thereby, they claim equality in education, human rights and political process (Ramazanoğlu, 1998 : 29).
If this equality is achieved, women will gain their freedom.
Gilman is considered an ‘unnatural mother’ because she sends her daughter to stay with her ex -husband and his new wife. Gilman faces the dilemma of being a mother and a writer. Mysterious nervous disorders that affect women’s intellectual achievements prevail among women at that time:
Taken all together these illnesses . . . can be seen as a collective response to the changing
shape of late nineteenth-century… in particular to the changing social positions and functions of women. Industrialisation had altered the nature of housework . . . leaving some women with leisure time to use their minds and others with a heightened commitment to motherhood as a perfectable science and the apotheosis of femininity. (Strouse, xv)
Gilman tries to create awareness about the condition of women in patriarchal society. “Too many of [Gilman’s] own psychic struggles were over defining self, its boundaries never stable, the distinction between self-fulfilment and selfishness never clear” (Berkin, 1979: 167).
Creating this awareness may help women struggle for improving their condition.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is about the internal dialogue of a woman diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed a ‘rest cure’. However, the ‘rest cure’ slowly drives her mad, cutting her off from any intellectual pursuits. After the publication of The Yellow Wallpaper, William Dean Howells introduces it as “terrible and too wholly dire, and too terribly good to be printed” (Lane, 1981: xvii).
However, Elaine Hedges reads it as a “feminist document as one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male- female, husband-wife relationship” (1973: 37).
A feminist perspective considers The Yellow Wallpaper as a destructive portrait of a woman trying to free herself from a traditional, depersonalizing marriage based on restrictive gender roles.
A Liberal Feminist Approach to The Yellow Wallpaper
After the narrator-main character gives birth to a baby, her husband John who is also a physician diagnoses her as “temporary nervous depression-slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, 1990: 153).
John prescribes a ‘rest cure’ for three months. The narrator’s brother who is also a physician absolutely forbids her to work until she is well again. The narrator moves to an isolated house together with her husband and her sister-in-law Jennie who is the housekeeper. John gives instructions for every hour because he does not let her write and think. Despite John’s prohibition of her intellectual activity of writing, she secretly continues to write: “I did write for a while in spite of them” (Gilman, 1990: 153). Patriarchal society expects women to be loyal, obedient and passive. This restraint means the limitation of not only thinking but also raising the consciousness of female. The narrator disagrees with this ‘rest cure’ and inactivity: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus —but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition” (Gilman, 1990: 153). This ‘rest cure’ represents the oppression and the imprisonment of women. The narrator does not object to John because women are expected to obey their husbands who know what is right in patriarchal society. At first, the narrator considers the wallpaper in her attic room aesthetically disgusting:
I never saw a worst paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing
every artistic sin… and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions. (Gilman, 1990: 154)
Behind his advice on women’s health including his disapprove of non-domestic activity by women (Notaro, 1999: 64).
The objectives of Mitchell’s therapy are as follows: “ The patient is surfeited with it and welcomed a firm order to do the things she once felt she could not do and introduced to the physician’s moral medication” (Lane, 1981: x).
That is to say Mitchell’s female patient trusts and depends on him for moral guidance and resigns herself to her role of a wife and a mother after getting through a therapy of ‘rest cure’ and restricted activity. There is a very clear similarity between Dr Mitchell and the physician John who is the narrator’s husband in The Yellow Wallpaper. Most of the health problems of women are believed to be caused by intellectual activity leading to “an afflux towards the brain of the blood which ought to flow towards the genital apparatus and in the female cranium the space destined to be filled with the brain is smaller” (Welter, 1976: 62, 58).
In fact, women are not really weaker-minded or smaller- minded because “whosoever lives always in a small place and is always protected and restrained will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it” (Brown, 1990: 277).
In this sense, the woman is narrowed by the private sphere. The short story The Yellow Wallpaper is not only a protest against the rest cure but also a critique of patriarchal medicine. There is a link between the phenomenon of female insanity and the policy of social control in the Victorian period. The society perceives women as irrational and sexually unstable and renders them legally powerless and economically marginal:
The medical belief that the instability of the female nervous and reproductive system made women more vulnerable to derangement than men had extensive consequences for social policy. It was used as a reason to keep women out of the professions . . . and to keep them under male control in the family and the state. Thus medical and political policies were mutually reinforcing. (Meyering, 1989: 56)
The narrator lives in the nursery at John’s mercy. The narrator expresses the torture of her emotional life in her room where her obsession with the yellow wallpaper begins and ends in madness. The yellow wallpaper in the room symbolizes patriarchal society’s cultural and social norms making the women plain, obedient and passive:
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by
moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub- pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight, she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour. (Gilman, 1990: 160)
According to the quotation above, the narrator becomes aware of the oppression that keeps the woman passive and realizes the first step to freedom. The woman behind the bars symbolizes the condition of both the narrator and the women in the patriarchal society.
The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and
sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots, she keeps still, and in the very shady spots, she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern -it strangles so. (Gilman, 1990: 161)
Shaking the bars symbolizes the struggles of women under the oppression who question the cultural norms in patriarchal society. Despite the rooted basic norms of the society, the struggle has been started to break the norms. However, the narrator stays in the room, creeping with a rope around her waist. That is to say she has not destroyed the bars inherent in her own self which develop out of a sociocultural self - conditioning. She remains imprisoned in the room because she is psychologically crippled. For her, the invisible bars are too strong even to try to destroy them:
To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to
try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued… But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope-you don’t get me out in the road there... It is so pleased to be out in this great room and creep around as I pleased! I don’t want to go outside. (Gilman, 1990: 163)
