It begins with the line:”It is very seldom that mere ordinary people
like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.” Here we can find
some keywords such as ordinary, secure, and ancestral. In the next paragraph,
we can find colonial, hereditary, and fate. Those words all point out to an
ancient, conservative, impregnable, dominant something which “haunted the
house”, and also haunted her as well as we can find throughout the story—
and which will last even after the story ends. That is, what tries to keep
her from writing and thinking, what defines her Not ordinary, what oppresses
her, and what drives her into madness in the end. It is the rules of the
patriarchal society that restrain her free mind, and we can follow the clear
trace that Gilman leaves for us everywhere in the story of how her
self-consciousness rise as the story goes on; we can feel her inward status
unstable, dangerous, fallen into pieces and restrained by the outside world
which is indifference and hostile to her. The story is about female who rebel
against the suppression of male, or say the society formed by masculine
values and doctrines, and the finale is so astonishing that we may have to
admit that she have succeed but in the mean time she also failed. The “crawl
” is the same time can be explained as a revolt against the world for she
totally breaks the rules in a unreasonable , a little violent way ;and as a
outcome under oppression that makes her unable to stand straight and walk
like a human.
To achieve her goal, Gilman used some very odd things like the
yellow-wallpaper, the women (illusions) come out from it, the creeping /
crawling to present us the rouse of female consciousness with a very queer,
mysterious atmosphere which is abnormal and rebellious—that just serve
exactly good for demonstrating us the destruction of norms, order and the
hypocritical harmony of the world. Gilman uses a lot of ways to show us the
discontinuous ,broken mental status / self-consciousness under the restrained
condition, such as the very short lines, paragraphs, and chapters also with
the highly use of dashes—those after or between the dashes are often her
real thoughts and feelings. More, Gilman draws a clear distinctness between
female and male, that is of the delicate sense but not reason. For instance,
she describes the wall-paper and the women so carefully and in detail from
their appearance, to smell, and to the movement in many a vivid way. So I
want to go back to the conclusion I just made in the previous paragraph now
and try to do the final conclusion of my own. What is the righteousness and
goodness to be a human—or MAN anyway? The price to be a man is too painful
and unworthy for a woman. Ironically, for being a normal man to a woman
simply means she have to violate her nature, then why should she, and why
should I ?
Lastly, this story keeps reminding me of two other masterpieces: “Notes
from Underground “ and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And it can be seen that in
fact not only this story cannot only address to the specific oppression of
women, but for women as a part of human, as individuals with mind and
thought, the story may also apply to the conflict and restrain from society
to any individual who lives in the world.
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