Gender Criticism In Edgar Allen Poe's The Yellow Wallpaper
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With The Yellow Wallpaper, the author attempts to demonstrate the importance of the feminist movement by showing the suffering women have to endure under the current gender roles. Gilman criticizes the rest cure and suppression of women with her story by demonstrating the consequences of a society in which men have all control. To better analyze this story the Gender Criticism theory can be applied. Gender Criticism is “an extension of feminist literary criticism http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/creating-literary-analysis/s08-03-gender-criticism-and-queer-the.html” and according to Parkrose University is defined as “reinforcement or deconstruction of gender stereotypes in literature (Langdahl, 2014). In other words, this means that gender roles are either supported or attacked in a piece of literature. The later is true for The Yellow Wallpaper, which Gilman uses to voice her criticism of the gender roles. It is kind of ironic that the very issue Gilman is condemning caused her to have many problems trying to get the story published. Various editors rejected her story because it was too melancholic. However, Yale University raises the questions if the editors “would have also rejected one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories for the same reason”, implying that her struggle to get the story published was related to her gender (Galullo, 2016).
Besides criticizing or reinforcing gender stereotypes, Parkrose University also names a few other concepts that are important for Gender