Thursday, July 24, 2014

Is there more than one theme to the story "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

There are actually several important themes mentioned, but
an additional theme that is often suggested is that “The Yellow Wallpaper” stems from
the circumstances of the narrator as a woman—as a human being—desperately in need of
self-sufficiency. In this story, it is about how the female narrator is driven into
physical weakness and mental breakdown by what passes in her world as love, solicitude,
and the best of medical care. Instinctively, she knows what she needs: work (“congenial
work, with excitement and change,” paragraph 13), freedom of movement and beautiful
surroundings (a well-decorated room opening onto a garden, paragraph 26), and separation
from her overmastering husband (the room she wants has no space for his bed, paragraph
27). Instead, her doctor husband, like her doctor brother, prescribes rest and no
writing, constant supervision (by her sister-in-law during the day, by her husband at
night), and a room away from outside doors and also with barred windows, a gate at the
top of the stairs, and ugliness (ugly furniture and torn and ugly yellow wallpaper)—all
of which repel her. She is in a nursery because she is being infantilized, in the sense
that she is not allowed to make any decisions for herself. The irony is that, because
every suggestion she makes to help herself runs contrary to the medical and
psychological knowledge imposed by males who live and move in the outside world, she is
thrust into the impossible position of being unable to trust her own instincts. She
therefore defers to her husband, persuades herself consciously that he is always right,
and speaks again and again of her “dear” husband and sister-in-law who both have nothing
but love and concern for her.

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