Write An Essay Of 1500 Words That Analyzes Literature ✓ Solved

Write an essay of 1500 words that analyzes a literar

Write an essay of 1500 words that analyzes a literary work from our anthology (not 'Friend of My Youth', 'The Bear on the Delhi Road', or 'The Stenographers'). Engage one or two scholarly interpretations of the work (articles, books, or reviews), explicate the work, and advance an original critical argument that departs from your secondary source(s). Use MLA format.

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Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" stages a claustrophobic domestic drama that has become central to feminist and medical readings of nineteenth-century literature. While scholars like Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the story as emblematic of the "madwoman in the attic" tradition and Elaine Showalter situates it within cultural histories of female hysteria and the "rest cure," this essay argues that Gilman’s narrator does more than simply embody oppressed femininity or fall victim to medical patriarchy. Instead, the narrator’s writing enacts a subversive linguistic and narrative practice: the wallpaper becomes a meta-text that the narrator gradually decrypts and reauthors. Where Gilbert and Gubar emphasize entrapment within patriarchal literary roles, I propose that the story ultimately stages a proto-modernist project of revaluing marginalized discourse and reclaiming authorship through the destabilization of language itself (Gilbert and Gubar; Showalter).

Engaging Two Critical Interpretations

Gilbert and Gubar’s influential reading locates "The Yellow Wallpaper" within a long female literary tradition in which women are represented as mad, monstrous, or otherwise textualized by a patriarchal canon (Gilbert and Gubar 34). For them, Gilman’s narrator is a symbolic return of the repressed female voice—the madwoman who literally inhabits the attic of patriarchal fiction. Elaine Showalter maps a cultural history: the story reflects medical discourses about female nervousness and hysteria and the abuses of the "rest cure" prescribed by male physicians, including John M. Charcot and Silas Weir Mitchell (Showalter 102–12). Both accounts compellingly demonstrate how patriarchal institutions—literary and medical—shape the narrator’s condition and reception.

Close Reading and Explication

Close attention to Gilman’s language, however, reveals a more complex interplay between confinement and creative agency. The narrator’s journalistic voice begins with submissive tropes ("John is a physician, and perhaps..."), but soon multiplies into patterns of repetition, metaphor, and self-correction that mimic the wallpaper’s swirling design (Gilman). The narrator’s prolonged, secretive writing is itself an act of composition: she documents, annotates, and finally dramatizes the movement she perceives "behind" the paper. Her narrative voice shifts from passive report to an insistent first-person rhetoric that attempts to describe the indescribable. The wallpaper’s pattern—at once vegetal, animal, and architectural—operates as a linguistic cipher. The narrator’s repeated attempts to "get out" from behind the pattern read less like a surrender to madness than like an attempt to translate a closed symbolic system into a new lexicon.

Argument: Reauthoring through Language

Contrary to the claim that Gilman’s narrator is only a victim of patriarchal silencing (Gilbert and Gubar) or purely the product of medical oppression (Showalter), the story stages a constructive engagement with language as a tool of resistance. Michel Foucault’s work on medical discourse is useful here: the narrator’s confinement is made possible by authoritative regimes of knowledge, but the subversive power of narrative lies in exposing the contingency of that authority (Foucault 217–22). The narrator’s textual practice—her private journal entries—displaces medical records and renders the physician’s ontology unstable. Where the male physician interprets absence of physical signs as absence of disease, the narrator produces an alternate archive: detailed, impressionistic, and affective. Her narration thereby undermines the epistemic monopoly of medical experts.

Moreover, Susan Sontag’s critique of metaphors of illness helps clarify how Gilman repurposes metaphor to critique metaphor itself. Sontag argues that illness metaphors can oppress by turning patients into moral or social allegories (Sontag 5–22). Gilman’s narrator reveals the danger of such metaphors—the wallpaper’s "pattern" can be read as a network of cultural scripts that name and immobilize women. But rather than submit to allegorization, the narrator literalizes and enacts the metaphor: she identifies the woman behind the paper and then writes her into being. This act of literalization is not passive; it is an imaginative method of rewriting the metaphor so that it becomes a vehicle for emancipation rather than condemnation.

Textual Evidence of Reclamation

Several moments in the text support this reading. The narrator’s sustained focus on the wallpaper’s "front pattern" and "back pattern" stages a hermeneutic labor: she separates surface from structure and then reconstructs meaning from the pattern’s disruptions (Gilman). Her line, "I’ve got out at last...in spite of you and Jane," can be read not simply as psychosis but as a performative declaration of authorship, where "getting out" is a rhetorical act of breaking a representational system (Gilman). The repeated use of present-tense verbs and rhetorical questions further signals an active attempt to compel recognition from an audience—first to herself, then to her husband, and finally to readers.

Conclusion

Read in conversation with Gilbert and Gubar and Showalter, "The Yellow Wallpaper" clearly critiques patriarchal literary tropes and medical practices. But to stop there is to miss how Gilman experiments with language itself. The narrator’s writing is not merely evidence of repression; it is the method by which she refashions meaning. By transforming metaphor into action and medical silence into narrative speech, the narrator stages a proto-modernist reclamation of voice. Thus, Gilman’s story should be read both as a document of feminist protest and as a sophisticated reflection on the power of textuality to redescribe and resist dominant forms of knowledge.

Works Cited

  • Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The New England Magazine, 1892.
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
  • Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. Virago, 1987.
  • Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard, Routledge, 2001.
  • Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Vintage, 1990.
  • Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. University of Virginia Press, 1990.
  • Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Hedges, Elaine. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage, 2011.
  • Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin Books, 2014.

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