THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND OPPRESSION: A FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

Abstract

Charlotte Perkins Gilman works also represent one of the central manifestations of feminist literature in the 19 th century with the Yellow Wallpaper being a criticism against the patriarchal subordination of the feminine. The protagonist in this work is actually a female who is taken to madness which is actually the negative effects of gender-based oppression, medical paternalism and lack of autonomy and this study adopts the qualitative research. By using the strict textual analysis, this paper examines how even the metaphor of the silencing and marginality that women have to struggle against in patriarchal society is itself being deployed by the story of how the narrator has been confined and isolation due to a pretense of medical attention. It examines the symbolic connotation in the yellow wallpaper regarding the psychological confinement of the main character, as a protest and opposition against gender stereotypes in the text. Through the feminist theory of literature this study illustrates that Whitman in her work The Yellow Wallpaper has criticized and opposed the notion of traditional gender roles and the rationale as to why the dominance of males over the females and their bodies and minds are undesirable. Focusing on text in that manner, the paper has also pointed out that the text is emotional account of the woes cast on women, but, more importantly, a social commentary on how women are relegated to intellectual and emotional cages. This account finally presents the story of Gilman as an influential factor of feminism in our time having to do with the matter of gender and mental health, and in a manner which in the end helps it attain all of the objectives of this kind of feminist critique in modernity.