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The Yellow Wallpaper Feminist Analysis Essay

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” perfectly lends itself to the eye of a feminist critic. Gilman’s narrator is highly unreliable as she recounts the horrifying treatment she received from her controlling husband and his complicit sister to destroy who this woman and completely eliminate her autonomy. This woman’s secretive journaling, though fictional, captures the essence of feminist issues in the Gothic era. In his chapter on Feminism, Robert Dale Parker states that it is a criticism mostly based off of issues with identity. Throughout Gilman’s story, her main character’s identity is slowly stripped down and reduced to nothing. So much so that she isn’t even clearly named in her own story. She spends her days living under …show more content…

She is the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator and perhaps this is the result of a phenomenon identified by Robert Dale Parker in his chapter on psychoanalytic criticism known as considerations of representations. This phenomenon causes people to focus on the less difficult memories and push the difficult memories and problems to the side while choosing to think in great detail about the easy everyday moments. It could be argued that the entirety of The Yellow Wallpaper is a representation of this psychological response. She focuses on the mundane aspects of her days while only touching upon the difficulties. Though she had probably given birth within a year, she only acknowledges her child once and very briefly and despite the fact that she is clearly traumatized by her husband’s barbaric treatment of her mind, she chooses to focus on the kind and loving nature that she still sees in him. It can take more than one reading to truly understand the brevity of this woman’s struggle as she clearly cannot handle the emotional toll it would take on her to write about her pain. Her journalings of simple things are probably her most cathartic exercise even if she must realize that her husband in all of his well-meaning will never let her do it in

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