Monday February 1, 2016
Theme 

     "The Yellow Wallpaper" offers a critique of traditional gender roles as they were defined during the late nineteenth century, the time is which the story is set and was written. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist, who rejected the trappings of traditional domestic life and published extensively about the role of women in society, and saw the gender roles of the time as horribly stifling. 

       The story's family unit falls along traditional lines. John, the husband, is rational, practically minded, protective, and the ultimate decision maker in the couple. He infantilizes his wife, referring to her as his "little girl" and brushing off her complaints. However, John is not purely the irredeemable villain of the story. Rather, we see how his ability to communicate effectively with his wife is constrained by the structure of their gender roles. This is an important point: John's happiness is also ruined by the strictures of traditional domestic life.  

       The narrator, his wife, is confined to the home, not allowed to work , or write, and considered by her husband to be fragile, emotional, and self-indulgent. Differing readings of the text's sarcasm lead to different interpretations of her voluntary submission to this role, but it is clear that her forced inactivity was abhorrent to her. The diary becomes a symbol of her rebellion against John's commands. The willingness of John's sister, Jennie, to submit to her domestic role in the home only increases the narrator's guilt at her own dissatisfaction. 

    The mysterious figure of a women trapped behind the yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol for the ways in which the narrator herself feels trapped by her role in the family. the narrator's urgent desire to free this woman, and to hide her existences from John and Jennie, leads to her raving final breakdown as she tears the paper, "creeping" around the room and over her husband who, in reversal of their traditional roles as strong protector and fragile child, has fainted in shock at the sight of his wife.