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The Yellow Wallpaper Feminism Essay

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Sanity and Freedom: the Feminist View of “The Yellow Wallpaper”
“Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy…she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her “inconstancy” and by identifying her with the “eternal types” they have themselves invented to possess her more thoroughly” (Gilbert and Gubar 812). Women in previous literary works have been oppressed and destroyed by their male counterparts. The oppression and destruction of the female characters in stories such as Gilber and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” originate in the male characters ' inaccurate perceptions of the women. The men in these stories eventually ruin them based on faulty assumptions related to …show more content…

Through this story, Gilman speaks of the imprisonment and psychological struggles placed on women by society. In her mind, gender roles must be removed from the social order for women to ever be free. By using feminist criticism, readers can analyze stories like Frankenstein and “The Yellow Wallpaper” and many others, both old/forgotten and new, through symbols (the wallpaper) and get a better understanding of the characters on how the women attempt to overpower the men. Women have a tendency to value their lives while, at the same time, find themselves conflicted and driven to insanity by the men around them. Men have always been the dominate gender in the past but as the years go by, women learn to speak up for themselves; to do things in order to break free of their entrapment and live as free and independent

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