Jane's rebellion takes place within the context of the patriarchal society that oppresses her. The room with the yellow wallpaper is symbolic of her imprisonment within the system set up by her husband, a doctor, and her brother, who is also a doctor. Trapped by the system they have set up for her, which is intended to be coddling but is also infantilizing, she sinks deeper and deeper into depression. Her husband's treatment of her is representative of the male medical establishment of the time, in which women's complaints, which often arose out of boredom (for wealthy women, who also had servants), were treated with a debilitating "rest cure."
Jane's rebellion consists only of peeling the wallpaper off her walls, which is, of course, not a rebellion at all. To fully resist the patriarchy of the time would have required her to leave the room with the yellow wallpaper. She would have had to escape from the infantilizing care of the men around her and to enter the world, in which she could do what she enjoyed, including writing.
Many people today would agree that the patriarchy controls women. While women are becoming more outspoken about their oppression, the systems of medicine, politics, business, and other realms are still controlled largely by men. In other words, these systems still ensnare women in a system that many people deem oppressive and unfair. It is only by enabling women to construct their own systems or change these systems that they can escape from the oppression of sexism.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
What is the lesson in Jane's rebellion and attempt at freedom? Is there a better way she could have handled her oppression? Do we see this in the world today?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment