Эссе на тему: Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's literary work The Yellow Wallpaper is often considered an important early work of American feminist literature that illustrates common social and physiological attitudes towards women in the 19th century. There have been a number of analyses of this literary text and various interpretations have been proposed. In this essay, I want to adopt a new critical approach by reasoning and exploring how the symbols of the text describe and emphasize the persecution of women over a period of time. While the effects of numerous symbols have indeed been asserted from the text to show such a fact, the interpretations of some of the predominant ones have been controversial.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" she portrays the narrator's madness as a way of protesting professional and societal oppression. against women. It gave the impression that male husbands and doctors were acting in their own best interests, but women were portrayed as mentally weak and fragile. Women's rights advocates of the time believed that the "outbreak" of this mental instability was a manifestation of their failures with respect to the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing because it ultimately created identity and became a form of defiance. Gilman realized that writing became one of the few forms of existence for women at a time when they had very few rights.

Gilman explained that the idea for the story came from her own experience as a patient, "the real purpose of the story was to get to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and convince him of the error of his ways." She had suffered from depression for many years and sought counseling from a renowned medical specialist who prescribed a "rest cure" that required her to "lead as domestic a life as possible." She was forbidden to touch a pen, pencil or brush and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.

After three months and near despair, Gilman decided to deny her diagnosis and treatments and began working again. Realizing how close she had come to a complete mental breakdown, the author wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her criticism of medicine. Gilman sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response. (Gilman was eventually proven right in her disdain for "rest cures" when she sought a second opinion from Mary Putnam Jacoby, one of the first female physicians and a fierce opponent of the theory, who prescribed the treatment regimen.

She added that the "Yellow Wallpaper" was "not designed to drive people crazy, but to save people from their insanity, and it worked." Gilman claimed that years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his methods of treatment, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as early as 1908 - 16 years after the publication of The Yellow Wallpaper - was interested in establishing entire hospitals dedicated to "rest cures" so that his treatments would be more accessible.