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September 25, 2005
The Yellow Wallpaper Agenda Item and Essay
Agenda Item:
“According to Lanser (author on http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/gilman.htm website), the color in Gilman’s cultural era “applied not only to the Chinese, Japanese, and the light-skinned African-Americans but also to Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and even the Irish” and symbolized “inferiority, strangeness, cowardice, ugliness, and backwardness.” I found this website after reading the text and feel that the sheer insanity of the poor woman could be caused by what we now refer to as post-partum depression that a woman can experience after pregnancy.
This book was written in 1892, when women were repressed still and couldn’t just go do some “retail therapy” or tell her husband that she wanted some anti-depressants. This seen to reflect the society’s values at the times that women were inferior and any attempt that they had of thinking on their own was wasteful and they were “nuts” to complain when they had it so good.
I find the fact that wall paper is yellow, which is the color of neutrality when a woman has a baby shower and doesn’t know the sex of the baby. Her husband John approaches the woman with a neutral assumption that makes her crazy because he just keeps encouraging “cod-liver oil” and promises to changer room colors if it makes her happy. He just wants to shut her up.
In the text, she says “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!” She eventually peels back the paper and tells John that he can no longer hold her in. Anyone who feels trapped, whether it is in thoughts or daily routines can go crazy, this story reflects that feeling in my opinion.
Posted by ErinWaite at September 25, 2005 09:20 PM