Female Marital Submission in The Yellow Wallpaper :: Charlotte Perkins

Female Marital Submission in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins "The Yellow Wallpaper" explains a woman's life in that time period, especially that of the narrator, who is living a life of a typical housewife of that time, but who is not able to cope with the oppression. Seems like the narrator fails to see her imprisoned state till towards the end of her story. The main character or the narrator is married to a doctor who is a typical male of those times. Also she has a brother who is in a similar profession as her husband. The narrator knows that she is not too well and that John - her husband does not realize the intensity of her sickness, he ignores her continuous efforts to make him aware of the real situation and her suffering. To make the situation worse he imposes his opinions on her even when it comes to her health. This story shows us the life and the thoughts of the narrator which lead her to be free, but go out of her mind in the sense of the real world. This story is written as if the narrator is writing it. The narrator is sick and her husband has made her a study project, She is continuously watched and thus she has no privacy. The critic of this paper Beth Snyder points out a similar view Hon's condemnation of both the narrator's imaginative vagaries and her writing impels his wife to write in secret and to seek a kind of obscurity in the bedroom, because no one must "find" her writing. Writing, then, becomes its own means for establishing inferiority. But because so much of the story relies on looking and being looked at, both obscurity and secrecy are problemised for Gilman's narrator. Hidden, she cannot hide, and is always illuminated for her spectator-husband "when the sun shoots in through the east window" or when "the moon shines in all night when there is a moon". Snyder in her paper, also mention another view, "It is essential for the narrator to believe that she is writing on dead paper, but she writes for an audience regardless of the paper's "lifelines" and brings another consciousness into the bedroom (the introduction of the audience seems to defy the deadness of the paper)". The narrator is extremely lonely, not in a physical sense, but in a emotional sense.