TWO PART READING RESPONSE: The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

PLOT

"The Yellow Wallpaper."

 The narrator along with her husband John, are renting a beautiful, secluded estate for the summer. The narrator suffers from what her husband believes is a "temporary nervous depression." He orders her to rest as much as possible, and picks a room in the house for the two of them. The narrator feels vaguely uncomfortable with the estate, but obeys her husband’s decision for the two of them to stay there. She also obeys him when he chooses a large, airy room on the top floor instead of the smaller, prettier room on the ground floor that she prefers. She pretty much obeys her husband when it comes to everything. Since the hubby is a doctor, he wins all their arguments. The narrator would like to spend her time writing, but her husband, brother, and assorted other family member think this is a terrible idea: she's on a rest cure, which means resting instead of doing pretty much anything else. She basically just has to lie around and rest. So a quick recap: The narrator is living in a house in which she feels uncomfortable, in a room she hasn’t picked out, and she's forbidden from engaging in the one activity she enjoys. No wonder she becomes absolutely obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room—she's bored out of her mind. She begins fanatically tracing the pattern of the wallpaper and soon becomes convinced that there's a woman trapped within the paper. Shortly before the narrator is due to depart the house she decides that she has to free the trapped woman by stripping the wallpaper off. When her husband comes into the room, the narrator declares that she is now free. When he saw his wife his wife creeping around the room peeling the paper off the walls, John faints. The narrator pays no attention to the unconscious hubby, and continues creeping around the room, and the story end in this way.

READING RESPONSE

'The yellow Wallpaper' written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story of sick women. She is locked because she had mental disease. Her passion is to write different stories, and this makes me to think that she is intelligent, but she is the victim of those who are closer to her because they have to care for her. The significance of the story is extraordinary as it introduce the fundamental issues of 'woman's place' in society. Feminism in the 19th century was the issue that brought a little bit of the idea of ​​gender equality.  The way the woman was treated in the 19th century is 70% different from today. At that time, the wife and husband were not equal to each other. Women were limited to specific roles. The Society usually held out a dominant role that led women to listen and follow their spouse. During that time the woman was at the end of the social class. The regular family was the one in which the husband commanded. Nowadays, the still woman does not have the same rights with her husband. This reality makes me feel bad because I am a woman of this society and I also love my own rights and that reality makes me to struggle even more. In this text it is rumored that the protagonist was intelligent to write, why she does not raise her voice? This question is the dilemma that I have with the author of this book because we are studying to be as cultured as well as smart and not to be as ignorant as when we was without studying. Women are intelligent, smart and not mad.