This weeks podcast and reading introduced an interesting consideration concerning women’s place in society. I read the Yellow Wallpaper my Junior year of high school; however, looking at it through a sense of domesticity provides a new perspective. As stated in the podcast, there is no such thing as just entertainment–all entertainment conveys a lesson, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant. The Yellow Wallpaper, however, has an obvious lesson concerning women being trapped in the empty role of domesticity. In the 19th century, women were expected to act as domestic angels, whose main goal was to preserve the home and care for their children. Even as middle and lower class entered the workforce, women were still expected to care for the domestic sphere in their home, adding a layer of uncompensated invisible labor.
In her narrative, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writes the story of a woman who feels trapped in the confines of her husbands grasps and her expected role as a domestic wife, while also battling “nervous depression”. As part of her treatment, she is forbidden from intellectual working of any kind, even writing–essentially, she must lie in bed all day. To fight her boredom, the woman secretly writes in her journal to rely her thoughts and keep her from experiencing a depressive episode. However, her life of boredom and basically imprisonment cause her to hallucinate a trapped woman behind the yellow wallpaper in her room. The trapped woman symbolizes herself and Gilman’s “fictional” character is a depiction of herself. Women’s roles in life being so tunneled into being wives and mothers created a feeling of frustration that can cause women to experience insanity, understandingly so. Such gender roles continue today and have been exasperated by the pandemic, as women perform the vast majority of domestic work in all homes. The narrative of women as ‘expected’ to perform the domestic work creates a cycle of implicit biases of sexism. Gender roles, which have been dramatically challenged in the past years, are still drilled into our society and our expectations of women; therefore, years of implicit bias reckoning must occur to tear down the pervasive misogyny.
I found the moment where she seems to believe that she herself is the woman from the wallpaper that has she has helped escape, which I think adds an interesting perspective to the narrative of the expectations that are put on women. Not only is the work load of domestic life placed on women, but the responsibility to pull themselves out of oppressive situations, as she does pulling “herself” out of the wallpaper, and to take care of themselves within restriction situations and minimal support.
I love the point that you made about the expectation of domesticity, because I learned in my leadership 101 class about the second wave of feminism and Betty Friedan, and during the time before the second wave women were experiencing the same issues as the woman in the Yellow Wallpaper. It is interesting to see the repeating pattern in history and the role that literature and storytelling has played in starting movements and bringing attention to underserved populations.