My+Yellow+Wallpaper

=My Yellow Wallpaper: Feminism=

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, Feminism is defined as “the theory of the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes”. It was in the late nineteenth early twentieth century when Feminism really began to come about. Women were considered inferior to men and so with Feminism came many various ways in which women began to fight for their right of equality. Women wanted more than to simply be the housewife and, so with this, women went on the prowl for equality so as to be able to have a profession as well as respect as men do. While experiencing the hardships of gender inequality when her father left her family for broke, Gilman vowed to make something of herself so as to be self-reliant and independent. Gilman spent most of her life playing an active role as a Feminist and so it is not hard to believe that “The Yellow Wallpaper” would also play an active role in women equality. In the world of Feminism there are endless amounts of categories that include, women’s inferiority to men, rights regarding authorship, and many more. One that may be a little less known is that of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. These two women are well known in the world of feminism, they came together in the 1970’s and wrote a book entitled, “The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination” which was published in 1979. This book deals with one idea that women writers of the 19th century were often “madwomen” due to the frustration of being suppressed in this male-dominated world. By researching these various “mad-women writers”, Gilbert and Gubar were finding that the madness itself was a metaphor for the female writer’s frustration.
 * Definition:**
 * Charlotte Perkins Gilman:**
 * Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar:**

When applying Gilbert and Gubar’s idea of a “madwoman writer” to Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, one can clearly see that the unnamed narrator is a woman who has a medical problem that goes misdiagnosed. Due to this misdiagnosed problem, the narrator is treated as if she is mentally unstable. Gilbert and Gubar would say that Gilman’s physical disease was due to the idea that she was so frustrated with men’s superiority to females everywhere. Gilman herself wrote that her story was “…not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy…”, which could be taken to mean that it was to help those who were trapped beneath the male-dominated society. This type of interpretation makes sense do to the fac that Gilman herself was a femanist and wanted to gain equality.
 * Feminism in “The Yellow Wallpaper”:**

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madwoman_in_the_Attic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Gilbert#Feminist_Literary_Criticism_and_Theory http://www.kino-eye.com/yp/whyiwrote.html Back to Intro page