“The Yellow Wallpaper” Essay Outline

1. Only recently did women begin to get recognized as equals to men and in some places they still are considered as inferior. workforce are typically dominating and controlling, while women are more submissive. The sensationalistic Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uses confining imagery, belittling dialogue, and stereotypical characters to demonstrate the sexual urge roles in nineteenth-century America. 2. The imagery in this short story conveys the feelings of a soul confined and trying to break free.Jane is a woman whose imagination is trammel by the patriarchal family. a. The windows are barred, (Gilman pg. 8) there are rings in the wall, and the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered (Gilman pg. 11). i. She is staying in a prison, symbolic of the way society is a prison to her creative inner self. b. Through the barred windows, Jane can converge the open country, which only makes her reflect on the freedom she does not commit (Shumaker pg. 596). c.The wallpape r is an image of the barrier she must put up amid the women society expects her to be and the women she wants to be. 3. The belittling and condescending way in which tush speaks to Jane reflects the way that men dominated over women. a. John calls Jane little cat (Gilman pg. 10) as though she were a baby. John is superior to her. b. John calls her moral illness a fancy. He does not really believe she is range and is only forgeing along the way a father would play along with his childs imagination. . Finally evolves into John speaking in a calm, careful tone as to not frighten Jane when she in the end goes crazy. 4. The carefully constructed character of a typical man and women show the roles society expects of John and Jane. a. The names John and Jane are carefully picked out to personate a trite man and women. They were very popular names derriere in the day and when an unknown corpse was brought in they were given the standard name John Doe or Jane Doe. b.The characters of the rational doctor and grotesque wife help portray assigned gender roles. Women are inventive and creative, while men are rational and like common-sense things (Shumaker pg. 590). c. John was a physician and so was Janes brother. It was a mans moving in and women are only good for household jobs. 5. The Yellow Wallpaper was all the way written during a time when men dominated society and women were thinking of as silly and imaginative. This short story demonstrates how some women had the feeling of elbow grease in a patriarchal society.