(no subject)
And interesting story was that of the one Gilman wrote to change one man's view of neurasthenia, but to use the story as a symbol of the oppression of women in a paternalistic society. To begin with, we know the name of the narrator's husband, but not her own. She is nearly anonymous; her identity is John's wife. This power imbalance extends to other areas of their relationship. John dominates her, albeit in an ultimately patronizing manner. His strong, practical, and stereotypically masculine nature is skeptical of her seemingly weak, feminine disorder as neurasthenia and other mental illnesses were often categorized, and he not she diagnoses her problem and prescribes the cure. When he tells her to exercise self-control over her irritation with him, the effect is ironic; he controls nearly everything about her and even makes her feel ungrateful for not valuing his help enough. The major function of John's control over her, as with Mitchell's control over Gilman, is his inhibiting her from writing. Though she feels writing would help her recover, as Gilman found, John believes it only saps her strength. He stifles her creativity and intellect and forces her into the domesticated position of a powerless wife. The act of hiding her writing whenever John is around is similar to the way literary women in the 18th-century, and even the late 19th-century when The Yellow Wallpaper was actually written in had to hide their work from their families; Jane Austen is famous for having written her novels while periodically stowing away the manuscripts in her family's living-room. It really was just a story of how the guy dominated in my view point and oppressed the female person.