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The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

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Suppression of both paternalism and of feminism is mixed in the pattern of the wallpaper in this short story Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” When Gilman’s narrator and her husband move to a summer home, the narrator voices her opinion that the wallpaper in her room be changed; an opinion which her husband disregards. “You know the place is doing you good,” John said, “and really, dear, I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three month’s rental.” (4) This is the symbolic of the clash of paternalism and feminism is personified by the wallpaper. “The pattern of the wallpaper has two structures.”(8) The front pattern means paternalism, and the back pattern implies women’s resistance of it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the room and the mixed patterns in the wallpaper in order to depict the oppression of the women and the subsequent consequences of that oppression for both narrator and her husband.
In the 19th century, the rights of women were not guaranteed, and women were controlled by their husbands, or fathers. As a result of this, women were discouraged from writing and expressing themselves, because men were afraid writing would make women move independent. In her work, “A Room Of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf stresses the importance of personal space for woman writers. It is her argument that in order to write great works a room of one’s own is a necessary and basic condition. In a woman’s own room, she is able to be from men’s control, thus

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