Research Paper on:
'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
this era. Gilman accomplishes this by demonstrating that Victorian social customs created a virtual prison for women, denying them self determination in a manner that could carve away at self  esteem and even sanity. The depiction of Victorian society that Gilman portrays demonstrates that this psychic damage was not inflicted maliciously or intentionally, but rather grew out of erroneous ideas  concerning gender, which denied women the same rights to autonomy that were routinely granted to men. The fact that the unnamed protagonist of Gilmans narrative is a virtual prisoner  is established early on in the story. She relates that her husband John, a physician, has diagnosed her as suffering from "temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency" (Gilman  154). The narrator is never allowed any control over her own life. She is not allowed to "work," although writing is clearly therapeutic for her as she is writing this  narrative secretly. Her protests against making the bedroom with the horrible yellow wallpaper their own during their stay in the country are completely overlooked. Her husbands sister has taken charge  of her home and it is suggested that the narrator is even restricted from seeing her own child. She comments that "the baby is well and happy, and does not  have to occupy the nursery with the horrid wallpaper" (161). As befits a woman who is practically a nonentity, the narrator in "The Yellow Wall-paper" is never named. It  is clear throughout the story that her husband dominates her emotional life as well as her physical life. The wife is not allowed to "own" her emotions. Anything that she  says that does not fit into precisely with the husbands thinking is belittled and called false. In other words, it is as if every time she says, "I feel..." or