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Feminist Criticism of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening

Feminist Criticism of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening. Escaping Patriarchal Roles in Society. A Feminist Criticism….

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Feminist Criticism of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening

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  1. Feminist Criticism of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening Escaping Patriarchal Roles in Society

  2. A Feminist Criticism… • According to Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction: A Critical Companion, the feminist critic must investigate the affects of sex, gender, and patriarchal society to determine their impact on readers.

  3. Plot Summary… • The Yellow Wallpaper explores women’s roles through the metaphor of a mentally-ill patient and her physician. • The patient disagrees with the diagnosis and prognosis of her male doctors, but her arguments are ignored because she is in a submissive position. • The woman is freed from this position through hallucinations projecting her feelings. • The nameless protagonist imagines a female is trapped behind the bars of a mysterious yellow wallpaper, and gains freedom by ripping down the paper to free her. • The reader is aware of the actions in the story through the narrator’s diary or “forbidden writings”.

  4. Plot Summary Continued… • The Awakening centers around Madame Pontellier, an upper class Louisianan, attempting to escape her traditional feminine role as mother and wife. • This woman, a painter, expands the social laws of the Creole culture and abandons her children and husband, setting up an independent house and life. • She has an affair with a younger man and entertains socially unaccepted guests. This character deviates from the norm of upper-class women. • Chopin’s character eventually contemplates and commits suicide; her path of escape.

  5. Argument… • Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are both female authors who attempt, through literary works, to convey women’s frustration with traditional societal roles. • The authors offer characters that break with the reality of patriarchal society to gain independence. • Gilman is focusing on the need for women to have internal, mental control while the need for women to be physically free and sexually conscious is the theme of Chopin’s novel.

  6. Physical Independence… • Kate Chopin’s novel emphasizes the physical realities of feminine roles in patriarchal society. • Madame Pontellier is concerned with freeing herself physically through love affairs and maintaining an independent household. • Her artistic endeavors are external. Her paintings are of other people and concrete, physical objects. She does not work with abstract feelings. • She physically breaks with reality by taking control of her own death, drowning herself in the ocean at the novel’s close. This ultimate demonstration of autonomy is taken as an act of desperation.

  7. Chopin Addresses Feminism… • Chopin uses the Pontellier’s to demonstrate a first wave feminist idea about urges. • Monsieur Pontellier is compulsive in spending and his actions, but not regarded as abnormal. • Edna becomes more compulsive and acts on urges to buy as well as sexual urges. Her actions are viewed as rebellious and strange. • The gender roles in patriarchal society allow these distinctions in character to be accepted. • Men are thought to be aggressive while women are traditionally expected to be passive.

  8. Mental Control… • The Yellow Wallpaper conveys the mental suppression of women in patriarchal society. • The narrator is forced by her doctors to withdraw from academic discussion and stimulating company. She has no control over her own mental development. • Her diary, though forbidden, is her only creative outlet and is also an internal type of art. She concentrates on interpretation and personal musings. • The narrator’s break with reality is found in her hallucinations about the yellow wallpaper and the woman she imagines trapped inside. This is internal loosening with reality is an attempt by the narrator to control and dominate her world.

  9. Credibility Through Experience… • Gilman’s patient and physician metaphor is powerful and useful because of her own experiences with mental-illness. • Charlotte Perkins Gilman…“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia…[this story] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (19-20). • This image opens the feminist argument and women’s placement in patriarchal society to a broader, expanded audience. • Gilman’s ideas correspond with what is known as radical feminism. She doesn’t want equality with men; she wants recognition as a woman.

  10. Works Cited… • Chopin, Kate. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: The Awakening. Ed. Walker, Nancy A. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. • Lane, Anne J., ed. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. • http://empirezine.com/spotlight/chopin/chopin1.htm • http://beta.news8.net/externalwebsite.hrb?website=http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/gilman1.html • http://www.selfknowledge.com/hrlnd10.htm • “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy • 4652

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