Resumo de The Yellow Wallpaper - Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Gilman?s The Yellow WallpaperCharlotte Perkins Gilman, in ?The Yellow Wallpaper? depicts Gilman?s struggle to throw of the constraints of the patriarchal society in order to be able to write and find an alternative means of self-expression. Gilman himself was a victim of the famous ?rest cure? devised for woman with nervous disorders by the neurologist Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. The Yellow Wallpaper delineates the gradual deterioration of a lady?s mental condition under the ?rest cure?, which included four steps: ?1) extended and total bed rest; 2) isolation from family and familiar surroundings; 3) overfeeding, especially with cream, on the assumption that increased body volume created new energy; 4) massage and often the use of electricity for ?muscular excitation?? (Lane, To Herland 116), until the patient?s mind victimized by constant persecution, incessant curbing of desires and subjection to an ideological prison is driven to seek another mode of reality where she is free.Gilman?s protagonist actively seeks an alternative mode of expression in her writing and considers the act of writing to be her one and only escape from the oppressive regime of ?rest cure?. The husband, john, a physician by profession, has convinced and coerced the protagonist in accepting a treatment for unsteady nerves although she herself believes that ?congenial work with excitement and change would do (her) good?. The protagonist at this point in the narrative seems perfectly fine and perhaps she is quite right in thinking that with ?less opposition and more society and stimulus? her nervous restlessness would have been alleviated. But in its place, she is made to stay in a house that she thinks is ?haunted?, made to take ?phosphate or phosphates?and tonics and journeys and air and exercise and?(is) absolutely forbidden to ?work??. In short she is given a crash course in how to be domestic and submissive according to the society.The lady is denied whatever she desires, however innocuous the wish might be. She loves to write but is forbidden to do so. She wants to visit cousin Henry and Julia but john would not hear of it. She wanted a room downstairs that ?opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window?, but she is given a room that she hates with pathetic wallpaper. Its ?color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded ?a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others?. In the course of the story, she appeals to John again and again for a change of room, for a change of house, but is talked into submission. Once the yellow wallpaper starts to get onto her nerves, she frantically pleas to her husband for changing it. But as John says ?after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.? What John fears and what the society fears is that if indulged in the list of change needed might soon extend to not only the gate at the head of the stairs, but the house and then perhaps the husband. This is the crux of the oppression that Gilman?s protagonist faces throughout the story until she is driven towards insanity. This is the oppression Gilman herself faced under Dr. Mitchell. After a month of treatment Gilman was sent home with the instructions to "live as domestic a life as possible . . . and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live" (Lane, To Herland 121). For a woman of Gilman?s intellect and stamina this was an impossible feat to accomplish. She says in her diary "I went home, followed those directions rigidly for a months and came perilously near to losing my mind" (Lane, To Herland 121).From this point we find Gilman?s protagonist moving towards losing her mind, slowly but surely. She progressively descries a ?broken neck and two bulbous eyes? in the design; ?a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade?; ?a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design?; and finally a woman ?a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern?. The woman she sees trapped inside the ugly wallpaper is no one but herself. And the more her mind is absorbed in this other level of reality, the more freedom this woman gains until the story culminates in a moment of epiphany as the protagonist identifies her own liberation with freeing this woman from the wallpaper trap: "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" Thus getting beyond the yellow wallpaper, women defied the corrupted power that men wielded over women, escaped their confinement, and created for themselves a new ideological role (Welter 372).

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