Butttt... while some claimed she went insane at the very end, it can be interpreted as her vindication of freedom in her oppressing marriage. It was oppressive because she wasn't allowed to make any decisions regarding her mental health. She was locked away by her husband in a room meant for rehabilitation but became disturbed by the ugly yellow wallpaper and the faces that showed up in it.
I think Gilman does a good job showing that men and women cannot understand each other fully and to attempt to do so is foolish. Even if it is from of the bottom of your heart, it's best that men just sit on the sidelines and let the woman take care of their own issues because they are the ones most familiar with them. The fact that the narrator wife steps over her husband as she makes laps around her wall at the end of the story symbolizes her conquering of marital freedom.
Good posting! I think you make some very insightful points. It is funny how even today there is this concepet that men are from Mars and woman are from Venus to depict how the sexes don't understand each other! Although the narrator's husband was a physician his understanding of women was limited to what the medical society said about women. It was indeed very sad to see.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on your post about Gilman's short story. The way the husband treated his wife, as if she was a child and didn't know what was best for her, really showed how men thought of women back in those days. She was better off listening to her instincts and doing what she wanted to do rather than taking orders from her husband when in reality, he's not sick, she is. The way she goes crazy in the end shows the way women wanted to break out from under that rule of men and be treated like regular adults.
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