The Sick Heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow Wallpaper

Abstract

           This study attempts to put Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s The yellow wallpaper in the context of contemporary theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s psycho-feminist scholarship The Madwoman in the Attic: The Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000). The two critics focus on the image of the imprisoned mad women in the attic like Bertha Mason, the mentally ill wife of Mr. Edward Rochester,   in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The image of the sick woman forced into domestic confinement of colors, shapes and wallpapers in an entire seclusion continued right into the twentieth century into the literary product of some of the women writers.  According to Gilbert and Gubar, some of those women Victorian writers tried to give voice to those women descending into sickness and mental diseases throughout their endeavor to oppress their awareness of the inner creative power which comes as a part of their desire to accept the limited social role they are trapped in.