I remember reading this short story back in high school. I remember at the time reading the story and feeling quite disturbed. The slow mental deterioration of the women being trapped in the room was described so vividly it shows the extreme conditions she was subjugated to. To people who read this story when it was published, to them, it was just a psychological horror story. We now know that this story was a critique of the position of women in marriage.<\/p>\n
From the beginning of the story, we can see the establishment of gender roles between the man and the woman. The man, a doctor, constantly proscribed treatments to his wife of how to cure her illness. In this case, he prescribed her to stay indoors and do absolutely nothing. The wife is shut down immediately when she voices her concerns about the treatment and argues its ineffectiveness. The belittlement of the man towards his wife forces the woman to journal her independent thoughts into a journal, which she ends up hiding from her husband. The progression of suppressing her independent thoughts and her physical confinments deteriorates her mental health even more and she ends up going insane.\u00a0Overall, this seems like an exaggerated short story of the institution of marriage. But, abusive relationships in marriage are still prevalent. Divorce rates, although not solely caused by abusive relationships, are higher than that have either been. The lack of respect, historically between the man towards his wife, is a huge factor, not only in this short story but has played a huge impact on the institution of marriage as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember reading this short story back in high school. I remember at the time reading the story and feeling quite disturbed. The slow mental deterioration of the women being trapped in the room was described so vividly it shows the extreme conditions she was subjugated to. To people who read this story when it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5093,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5093"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7354,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350\/revisions\/7354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}