Examine The Yellow Wall Paper from a feminist Stand point.

Ans.

Though feminist approach to literature in right earnest began much later, nonetheless feminist tendencies can be detected much earlier in the writings of revolutionary nineteenth and early twentieth century writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Char lotte Perkins Gilman. It is worthwhile to note here what, roughly speaking, is meant by feminism although it has diversified a lot, engaging itself with bio logical, linguistic, psychoanalytic, Marxist etc. studies. In a nutshell, feminism or feministic theory champions the identity of women, demands right for women, and promote women’s writings as representations of the experience of women: Feminism challenge the heterosexual matrix that organizes identities and cultures in terms of opposition between man and women. Elain Showalter distinguishes ‘the feminist critique’ of male assumptions and procedures from gynocentrism. Some of the basic issues involved in the feminist literary criticism can be summed up as:

1. Western Society, controlled by patriarchal ideology keeps women in subjugation.

2. Men have their norms and women are defined as ‘other’ with reference to these norms.

3. Sex and gender are not the same, and need to be distinguished. Sex is biologically determined while gender is created by society/culture.

4. The aim of the feminist criticism is to promote gender equality. In her non-fictional writings Charlotte Perkins Gilman strongly indicts the patriarchal culture (Women and Economics, in Home: Its Work and Influence and Concerning Children). She discusses the detrimental effects that restrictions on women have on the family. From 1909 to 1916 Gilman edited The Forerunner, a magazine containing wholly of her own articles and fiction dealing with women’s issues. Her novel His Religion and Hers developed her ideas about sexual relations and oppressions in modern society.

In the story The Yellow Wallpaper, the feminist angle is directly obvious but conveyed through subtle hints and symbolic representation.

The male superiority is hinted at in a light-humoured way in the following:

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” The husband, though he loves his wife does not attach much importance to the complaints and misgivings of the wife:

“You see he does not believe I am sick.”

Asserting his superiority, both as a professional and male he does not care to dive deep into the psyche of his wife and takes everything for granted. The husband in his obstinacy rejects the suggestion of moving elsewhere, which might possibly have avoided the disaster. about what led to her depression we can only surmise, but surely it has much to do with relationships and confirming to the norms set by a male-dominated society.

Now comes the powerful, though fanciful image of women’s or a particular woman who happen to be behind a pattern, a woman shaking at the bars. The bars may stand for the restrictions imposed on the woman by a male dominated society and ‘shaking of the bars’ indicate her desire for freedom from those restrictions. A heart to heart talk on equal terms with her husband might have saved her from the mental derangement she ultimately succumbs to.