Attitudes of Men in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman :: free essay writer

The Yellow Wall Paper: Attitudes of Men I feel that The Yellow Wall Paper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was written as a response to the attitudes of men and male physicians toward women during this time period.   Gilman experienced the ordeal the woman narrator went through and in the introduction it states, "Gilman consulted the prominent nerve specialist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and underwent his famous 'rest cure'--a regimen of total bed rest, confinement, and isolation" (p. 799).   The woman narrator was also isolated in one room with only the yellow wall paper.   I feel that this type of confinement led her to become delirious and she stepped over the boundary to insanity.   She sees that "the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out" (p. 806).   The woman in the wall paper is the narrator herself trying to break free from a male dominated society.   This point of a male dominated society relates back to her husband, who is in fact a doctor, who is ordering her to take total bed rest.   She does not have any choice but to listen to her doctor husband.   Ã‚   The yellow wall paper has imprisoned her in this room.   I feel that the wall paper is a symbol of a male dominated society.   At first she absolutely hates it and then as she slips farther and farther out of reality, it grows on her:   "This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!" (p. 803).   The smell of the room itself is a symbol of male dominance:   "It [the smell] is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met" (p. 809).     Ã‚  Ã‚  Gilman experienced this male domination first hand.   "Returning home, her attempt to follow Mitchell's advice, which was to devote herself to domestic work and her child, [and] severely limit any intellectual work . . . almost drove her to the brink of 'utter mental ruin'" (p. 799).   By doing so, she had to succumb to what the doctor had ordered.   To give in to such orders and give up a passion of yours is humiliating just as the woman creeping by daylight is humiliating (p. 810).   Ã‚   In the story, the woman narrator, had to give in to her husband just as Gilman had done with Dr.