Is That Feminism in the Wallpaper?

Throughout the year we’ve examined literature dealing with women’s roles, and I must say, watching the transition from domestic literature to controversial stories with feminist undertones. The Yellow Wallpaper is the perfect story to begin talking about the feminist awakening in literature because, at least in my opinion, the narrator’s journey to find meaning in the wallpaper coincides with the nineteenth century’s feminist writers journey to immerge from oppression.

In our course, the first glimpse of literature’s “woman in the wall paper” came in the Wide, Wide World. In this purely domestic novel, a literal guidebook on how to be a good girl, we saw Ellen Montgomery poke the fire. In this act she defied her society and gave period readers shivers of excitement—this was controversy. We moved on and on, encountering example upon example of girls putting their toes across the social boundaries. Eventually we were cross-dressing. And only weeks before the end of our studies we encountered the advent of Gothic literature as a feminist weapon. (This is what I would equate the narrator’s acceptance of the creeping woman, essentially the full extent of her insanity.) In both A Whisper in the Dark and The Yellow Wallpaper, the universally creepy elements of Gothic Literature force the reader, whether male or female, into the shoes of the persecuted woman. And in this, the writers win. They fully subvert early nineteenth century and hail in a new age.