Preview

Female Insanity In Richard Wagner-Martin's Stetsons Short Story

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
300 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Female Insanity In Richard Wagner-Martin's Stetsons Short Story
The historical context is important when reading this short story. In the time period it takes place, women really didn’t have a say so. Linda Wagner-Martin explains this as she writes “Elaine Showalter describes the high rate of increase in female insanity during the Victorian period as "one of history's self-fulfilling prophecies. In a society that not only perceived women as childlike, irrational, and sexually unstable but also rendered them legally powerless and economically marginal, it is not surprising that they should have formed the greater part of the residual categories of deviance from which doctors drew a lucrative practice and the asylum much of their population…” In Stetsons story she listens to her husband and follows all of
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.
    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Literary Evaluation: The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story.

    Stetson put a lot of thought into the characters that she chose for the story and the setting in which they were placed. In the 1800s, the role of the woman was to stay home to cook, clean and raise the kids while the husband worked. The men were the authoritative figures and the women did what they were told.. In this case, the narrator is both the patient and the wife, so her husband/doctor controls her life completely. The task of the reader in…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Why Does Gilman Make Both The Narrator's Brother And Her Husband Doctors
    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Why Does Gilman Make Both The Narrator's Brother And Her Husband Doctors

    Reading “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” I came to feel that Gilman made both the narrator’s brother and husband doctors to make point that men in general were the dominant species. Having both men as doctors shows that men had the well established careers, knowledge, authority, and the women were meant to be submissive and domesticated. Men were the doctors who told women "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day”. Gilman showed that the narrator’s true illness was mental illness and letting man have power over her thoughts, actions and life as she once did.…

    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Female Liberation in the Agency
    • 1618 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Female Liberation in the Agency

    Britain in the 19th century was a patriarchal society and the dominant idea was that there are irrefutable natural differences between genders. Therefore, males, who occupied the dominant positions, were born for business, finance, and politics, while women were expected to marry, manage the family, and take care of the children. It seems that females in that period were thought to be miserable, tragic, and wretched and did not have suffrage rights, the right to sue, or the right to own property. Their inferior jobs such as babysitter or textile worker were barely enough to survive on. Worse still, most working women were employed in the unskilled, unorganized, service jobs and were paid a lower salary. Some of them were even required to become prostitutes out of desperation. Later, females entered some male dominated industries, but they only got one third of a man’s salary. There were still a large amount of women who lived as housewives, like Mrs. Thorold was pretending to do in the novel. They merely managed the family or were considered decoration in the living room. Women’s social value and working rights were denied by men, who were the heads of society.…

    • 1618 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Seeing Oppression in Gilman’s “the Yellow Wallpaper”
    • 1306 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Seeing Oppression in Gilman’s “the Yellow Wallpaper”

    The attitude towards women’s health by doctors and physicians has changed greatly over time. Women aren’t looked down upon by male doctors anymore, nor are these women dismissed as crazy or simply stressed when they believe they don’t feel well, seeking medical help. However, women in the past—specifically during the nineteenth century and before that—weren’t so fortunate. Oppression against women was great at that time; a woman receiving the same treatment as men was practically crazy, especially when women were supposed to be submissive, meek, and kind housewives to their men. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a turn of the century short story, an unnamed woman, suffering from what’s presumed to be postpartum depression, is prescribed the “rest cure” by her physician husband. They reside in a rental home for the summer, and the woman is isolated in a locked upstairs room to recover. From that point on, the readers watch as the woman slowly loses her mind under the influence of the rest cure. By writing the story from the first person point of view, the reader catches a large glimpse of the effects of the nineteenth century’s oppression by physicians against women.…

    • 1306 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Insanity In Jane Stetson's The Yellow Wallpaper
    • 412 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Insanity In Jane Stetson's The Yellow Wallpaper

    By staring at, ‘[the] recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down,”(pg. 649, Stetson) the protagonist, the narrator, from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper becomes insane. However in this case, the narrator’s insanity develops a form of emotional and mental liberation for herself.…

    • 412 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Postpartum Depression In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Postpartum Depression In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Though Charlotte Perkins “Gilman did not become a creeping lunatic” like the narrator in the story, she was a “survivor who unlocked the door of the madwomen in the attic, and lived to tell about it.” Let “The Yellow Wallpaper” be a window into the notion and treatment of mental illnesses in the late 1800’s and a “moral lesson [to not] put women with [postpartum] depression into solitary…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Women In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
    • 1090 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Women In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

    A woman can either be a ball-cutter or a whore. The novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written by Ken Kesey is set in a psychiatric hospital in Oregon around the 1960’s. The hospital is its own small world of regulations, routine, and discipline ruled over by Nurse Ratched, also known as Big Nurse. All the patients in the ward are believed to have mental illnesses of some sort, a few are “victims of matriarchy” according to Harding. Thus the female characters in the novel can be divided into twlo extreme categories: “ball-cutters” and whores. Through examining the contrasting images of women in the novel, Kesey upholds a misogynistic view of women based on their respective categories.…

    • 1090 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Second Great Awakening Dbq Analysis
    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Second Great Awakening Dbq Analysis

    In a letter from a Lowell mill girl in 1844, she describes her work schedule, which occasionally ranged to 13 hours in the factory per day. Although provided breaks, she states the girls’ annoyed beliefs saying that “laboring girls can say, who think nothing is more tedious than a factory life.” (Document B) An opportunity for women in the workplace was still extremely rare, but becoming more known. Still under the impression of becoming a ideal bride, women worked before marriage and then became housewives/mothers. In the family, women were also becoming in charge of a new trend, a child centered environment. This differed from in the past where childhood was short and tough. During the Age of Reform, middle class women played a big part in the reform crusades, finding it as a way to get out of the house and enter public affairs. Not only was the reform about evangelists and the market revolution, but criminal codes and laws were lightened, mocking the European practices. A problem that was brought to Dorothea Dix (the superintendent of women nurses, and an opinionated reformer) that those diagnosed of mental illnesses was being treated with superior cruelty. Carrying this awareness with her and trying to put a stop to it, she…

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Best Essays

    Women and 19-Century Domesticity in "The Yellow Wallpaper"
    • 1964 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Women and 19-Century Domesticity in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story about a new mother attempting to overcome her diagnosis of depression by being cooped up in a room without normal human interaction as prescribed by a top-rated male psychologist. The gender role expected of the nineteeth century woman was not ideal to the main character. The story goes on to critique the treatment plan set forth by her husband and psychologist. This in turn critiques the entire belief system in the nineteeth century that women should not be working outside the home. Gilman reveals in “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’?” that the story parallels one of her own, with exaggeration (Gilman “Why I Wrote” 804). Through research and an analytical reading, I will demonstrate how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” contradicts the gender roles that were placed on American women in the nineteenth century.…

    • 1964 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Best Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Life For Women In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Life For Women In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Lives for women in 1892 were heavily controlled by men. Women were treated as if they were inferior to men. Charlotte Perkins Gilman brings light to this problem in a interesting way. Gilman herself, was in fact driven to near madness and later claimed to have written “The Yellow Wallpaper” to protest this treatment of women like herself, and specifically to address her physician. Although they never replied to Gilman personally, they are said to have confessed to a friend that they had changed their treatment of hysterics after reading the story. While real life aspects are apparent it’s the symbolism and subliminal feminist in her story to show how a woman’s role in society is limited with no control or creative outlet.…

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Yellow Wallpaper
    • 2088 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Yellow Wallpaper

    The Yellow Wallpaper points out a crucial point about how women were treated back in the 1900’s. In the 1900’s women were often forbidden to work by men and diagnosed with temporary nervous depression (Wikipedia, 10). When a woman was diagnosed with the disorder they were often locked up or isolated (Wikipedia, 10). Men had an abundance of power back then. John had forced his wife to be locked upstairs in their home and ordered that she be socially isolated. . It seems John doesn’t do anything to help his wife out which leads us to wonder what role did John have in his wife going insane? John was the main and whole reason for her being sucked into insanity. He did this by locking her in a room secluded from the world and refused to listen to her comments and didn’t allow her to have any emotional release…

    • 2088 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Stereotypes In American Society
    • 1133 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Stereotypes In American Society

    She is a woman who suffers from a mental illness and is cared for by her doctor who also happens to be her husband. “John is a physician, and (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick!. And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysteric.” The women is being treated by a man who doesn’t even believe that she has an illness, what she feels in being pushed aside and she is being told how to feel by her husband as if he knows what best for her. This shows that her husband does not think she is strong enough to make decision regarding her mental health. The treatment he suggests for her is to not write in her journal, she goes against his wishes. This shows strength because going against what a man said was unheard of during this time period. The narrator made the decision to look out for herself and her mental health rather than her relationship with her husband. ‘"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to…

    • 1133 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Blind Obedience in the Yellow Wallpaper
    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Blind Obedience in the Yellow Wallpaper

    The levels of inequality within the marriage of the narrator and John are great. John is very controlling of his wife/patient, and she obeys his orders because she believes that “if a physician of high standing, and one 's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency--what is one to do?” (Gilman 1). She fears that she is ill, but doubts herself because “[John} does not believe [she is] sick” (Gilman 1). Because she views John as an all-knowing man, he becomes the all-deciding party in their marriage. To add to the inequality, John denies her identity as a wife by allowing her to only become his patient, or at best a “little girl” (Gilman 7). Unfortunately, the narrator complies to her husband’s orders. She has respect for her domineering husband as a male authority figure and a “physician of high standing” (Gilman 1). Even though she disagreed with his method of treatment and rather believes “that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good”, not once does she confront him (Gilman 1). Instead of confronting him, she disobeys his orders only in her free time when he is not around.…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Feminist Symbolism in Glaspell's "Trifles"
    • 1700 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Feminist Symbolism in Glaspell's "Trifles"

    Since the women of modern day have much more freedom than women did back then, it is hard for many people, men and women to understand exactly what Mrs. Wright was going through. Unlike now where women are allowed to get divorced and not be shunned from society, in this time period husbands were allowed to kidnap their wife, imprison her, beat her, etc. Any police intervention was to discourage or lessen the abuse but not stop it. (Hecker 34)(DeLuzio 96) Women had few resources and even fewer sources of support, no matter what was taking place in their homes. Women could not sit on juries nor give a judgment of their peers (Ruben).…

    • 1700 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Cathedral by Raymond Carver - Narrative Perception
    • 1248 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Cathedral by Raymond Carver - Narrative Perception

    It can be concluded from the story, that the woman is not simply in a new home with her husband, who just so happens to be a doctor. She is more than likely in a mental institution, admitted for depression. She says that her new home stands "quite alone, standing well back from…

    • 1248 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More

Related Topics