Male Dominance in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper

masculine Dominance in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The yellow(a) Wallcomposition I want to bewilder him, (34) says the vote counter, referring to her husband, in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, as she writhes behind the patterns of her yellow wallpaper, locked in her path of barred windows, sunken in the lunacy that she cannot evade. This short, ambitious phrase laid squarely on the page on a lower floor stacks of similarly dyspnoeal phrases that string together this diary-style narrative conveys roughly cl proto(prenominal) the narrators prime hearing for her actions John. He is her husband, her care-taker, the only man in her life, and in spite of the near-reverence that the narrator has for him, it is only in the final pages, when this stunning sentence is uttered, that Johns wife endeavors to work more than Johns respect for her. She wants to provoke awe, the sort of astonishment that might devise him feel as though he were mad, and would, thus, free his wife from beneath his condescending gaze. For the act, or the being-caught-in-the-act, of tearing off the wallpaper, and not the removal of the paper itself, will liberate the narrator most fully. What binds Johns wife, what binds the woman reflected back at her behind the wallpapers troubling patterns, is not so much the physical harness of the home, but the less visible patriarchal society of the late 19th and early twentieth century. In The Short Story the Reality of Artifice, Charles whitethorn cites Bonaro Overstreets description of twentieth century drama, calling it the drama of what goes on in the mind (17). Gilmans story inhabits the dynamic mind of a woman instinctive to disclose to her readers everything she sees and feels. This first-person confessional, littere... .... Gilmans startling ending comes after nearly six pages of intensification, and it is a most dramatic finale, perhaps the heartiest parody of that Gothic romance mentioned early on. When John faints , revealed to the reader by the narrators question, for isnt that silly of him, the story to clatters to a most rousing close. She has astonished him, into unconsciousness, toppled him like a tower the way she naked the paper from the wall. And there, upon the ground, John remains, Gilmans weighty, though squeamish, symbol of male dominance around which the narrator, the woman writer, may now creep, though ultimately, one hopes, stand in the first place and walk with. Works Cited May, Charles. The Short Story the Reality of Artifice. New York Twayne Publishers, 2002 edition. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. London VIRAGO Press, 1988 edition.