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The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Contemporary Issues
What does the term gender mean? Biological identity (sex) determined by
your body, gender is built around that and what is expected of you because
you are male or female
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How does the concept of gender impact on the individual? Characteristics of
what it is to be male and female, e
...
football is more of a male sport,
sewing is more of a female sport
...

How is the representation of gender managed and what are the dominant
disclosures at play? Stereotypes, controlled by media
...
Magazines, TV
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If you fall outside if your gender roles, then
the chances are you will feel like an outsider
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Equal
pay, certain jobs male dominated, right to wear trousers as a woman over a
skirt
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Western culture is more advanced for
woman, many other cultures, females can not have access to education,
forced marriages etc
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These go right back to the middle ages, called conduct books
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How to be good wives, mothers, cook
meals…etc
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Woman are always discoursed to motherhood, media – chase for internal
youth
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One of the most important dominant
discourse is that marriage should be a man and a woman
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The women generally took small
pieces, as time passes bigger and bigger pieces are taken until one man tries
to completely undress her, the audience intervene
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We are defined and
confined by our clothing
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Eve – A snake made her eat the apple (temptation) and was banished from
the garden of Eden
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Female
body is punished for weakness
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Binary discourse of gender, stereotypes of representation
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Historical Context – Discourses have confined women to their roles as
homemakers, wives and mothers
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If men are
recognized as the vessels of creative power (pen) and women become the
recipients of that power (page)
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Susan Gubar’s “The Blank Page” and the
issues of Female Creativity (The Madwoman in the Attic)
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In the Yellow wallpaper, the nursery has bars on the windows,
like a prison
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The pen is a metaphor for
the penis and so have the creative capacity, whoever owns the pen has the
power
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Manifest anxiety of women in the 19th century was a large issue
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If you take away the penis
then you take away the masculinity
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The yellow Wallpaper – Conflict between motherhood and her creative
energy – she wants to write, we know she does write because she narrates
the story but she is denied it by her husband and sister in law Jenny
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John is a physician, and perhaps (I would not say this to a living soul, of
course, but this is a dead paper and a great relief to my mind) perhaps this is
the one reason I do not get well faster
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She can not express her
own desires to work and so her outlet is the wallpaper, and becomes a
projection of her mental state
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Hysteria – Word for womb, highly strung, it situates it within the female
form
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman took part in the political movement by
writing
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1890 NAWSA – ran state by state campaign to obtain voting right for women
NOW – National Organization for Women
Literary Modes – Women tended to favor autobiography, epistolary,
confessional, short stories
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932
Advocate for euthanasia and took an overdose of chloroform and
completed suicide in 1935
Rather than the cancer eating away at her she wanted to have control
over her body
Yellow Wallpaper 1892
Feminist, sociologist, novelist, poetry
Related to Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Yellow Wallpaper
What is the story about? Woman’s oppression, how she is controlled by her
husband to conform to the stereotype of a wife and mother, she is nothing
more because she is a women and so her creativity can not be shown
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Also
the fight for the pen and women’s creativity
...
Yellow is a motivational color and a color
associated with the brain
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Who or what is shaking the pattern of the wallpaper? The moonlight is
shaking the pattern and the narrator mentally sees other women trapped
and moving the paper
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It can
also be other people outside the social position, gay men
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Conflict with power
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The creepiness is part of her mental
assimilation into the wallpaper
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At night all the scary creatures come out and so we got o bed, we are not
nocturnal
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Also she sees other trapped women
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She is trying to show women can be creative and have a voice and should
not be put into a gender role just because society puts them there
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Explore the description of the nursery and the wallpaper patterns More like
a prison cell, bars on the windows, in the attic
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