Current Event

Charlotte Perkins Gilman would have a lot to say about the current state of a woman's place in the world. Although women have come along way from being simple child bearers and companions for their husbands I don't believe we've come as far as Perkins would have wanted. Women are still striving to be granted equal pay in the workforce and to be treated respectfully. Gilman called herself a humanist and believed society is to blame for the way women are treated. As long as there still people alive and well who believe women to be possessions not people, women will still constantly be trying to be seen as equals.

Literary Analysis

One of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most notable works on women's suffrage is 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'. The short story is an epistolary type novel. Which means, it's written in the form of documents; in this case, the narrator's journal entries. The narrator is a young woman who's husband acts as her physician. She's just recently given birth to a child and is suffering from postpartum depression. The woman's husband keeps her locked away in an upstairs room, believing this will help her. In the end, it only makes her worse. The isolation from friends and family makes the narrator slowly descend into a madness. The yellow wall paper that covers the room begins to look like there is a woman behind it, trying to crawl out.

The story itself is a twisted auto-biography of the author's, Gilman's, own treatment after she went through postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. This coincides with the Realism aspect of the story. Realism is said to reflect the lives a modern, middle class people. This not only reflected it, but bits and pieces of Gilman's own reality were put into her story.

The narrator of the story is suppose to represent women of the Nineteenth century and how they were repressed to follow the orders of their husbands. Or any man or boy for that matter. Women were to be seen not heard and a man's opinion was always taken over a women's. Whether it was right or wrong.

The narrator's husband represents most men of the Nineteenth century. Her husband believed in science and he thought that keeping his wife locked up would heal her. Despite his wife pleas, he continued on with his treatment. I don't believe this necessarily makes the husband a typical antagonist of the story. True, the way he treated his wife was not right, but that was normalcy back then. He was simply being the husband he thought he needed to be. It didn't mean he didn't love or care for his wife. Obviously, he did or he wouldn't have tried to treat her.