‘The Awakening’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ must first and foremost be understood in their historical framework. By the turn of the century, journals, art galleries, and works of fiction were swamped with notions about how to be a proper woman in middle class society. With industrialization, urbanization, declining birth rates, amplified divorce rates, the shift away from the home and the rise in the number of single men and women in the professional class, Americans dreaded that their families would disintegrate. Thus, one of the most important changes to American culture in the late 19th century was the change in the perception and illustration of gender roles.
Besides the changes in social order, Americans experienced intense economic modifications. Large corporations replaced small family businesses and people were reliant on their employers. The gap between the rich and the poor radically increased. These changes resulted in an understanding of the home as the last refuge for traditional values for both men and women.
Despite the new feminist activism inspired in part by women’s roles in the Abolitionist movement, as well as the Temperance and Suffrage movements, women were supposed to exemplify the conventional values represented by the home. In this way, women were associated with the home; both were emblems of the ethics Americans hoped to maintain. The home turned out to be a female gendered domestic space in which women, as the custodians of customs and ethics, both obtained and lost power.
The Essay on how samuel slater changed american industry
American Industry in undoubtedly one of the strongest in the world. Numerous nations are recipients of many of our plethora of exports. From cars, to books, to corn, and everything in between. But where did this amazing system come from? Was it some aspiring urban businessman? Or maybe a tired housewife. It could have even been a son of a farmer. The system itself did not come from one person, but ...
Glorified as morally better members of society who would protect the family from the harms of business and modernity, women were expected to be chaste, benevolent, self-sacrificing, cultivated, cheerful, compassionate, well-read in the appropriate fields and economical. This structure of womanhood empowered women to become more educated and handle household finances, while also restraining them through firm rules regarding what they read, how the home should be maintained, how to act in public, and all other measures that could be interpreted as a manifestation of the family’s ethics. Most significantly, by relegating women to the conjugal sphere, many women were barred from the new economy and therefore were more and more reliant on their husbands for income. Without the establishment of the separate female gendered domestic sphere, the process of developing a male centered corporate culture would not have been probable.
During the 19th century, domesticity was romanticized in literature, mostly in literature by women. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, politicized the home by making it central to social action. By the turn of the century, women like Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, produced novels that flouted conventional women’s roles in the home. In each text, the female character fantasizes about escape and freedom. Women are depicted as functioning “as a display of her husband’s wealth” as suggested in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics regarding the wife’s function which is “to dress and entertain, and order things.”
In The Awakening, Chopin questions fin-de-siecle gender roles, but also illustrates that, due to years of taming, many women are incapable of breaking away from those roles by any acceptable means. Perplexed by the pull of a new desire, Edna Pontellier does not have the skills required to become free and, despite efforts to flee through androgyny, she yields to the hopeless dream of romantic love. The New Woman wants freedom, and deserves it, but has not been given the skills necessary for survival. Images of birds, from the caged bird at the story’s beginning to the symbolic one of the “pigeon-house” into which Edna withdraws, hint that the New Woman is a bird with broken wings. Society and religious conviction, as forms of patriarchy, blind women to the limitations of their gendered individualities and encourage the “angel in the house” image of perfection as their happiest function; that of the “mother-woman”.
The Essay on Women’s roles within the History Boys
Dramatic comedy often sees the woman take on a role of insignificance. They become the prey, the desired possession and are not seen as equal beings to male characters. This has been apparent throughout history from the very birth of comedy. Plautus for example developed his comedy from the Greek’s new comedy and so also inherited a bias against woman. Any female that did appear within his ...
After she leaves her husband, Edna thinks that her new sexually autonomous supremacy will make her the master of her own existence but she is still held back by her “limited ability to direct her energy and to master her emotions”. Sadly, Edna has been cultured too much in the mores of society and not enough in reason and autonomous survival. While admitting to Robert that “we women learn so little of life on the whole” she shows has internalised society’s notion of woman as guided by her passions and not her mind. Edna’s sexual want for Robert weakens her independence since it only promotes the ideas of her education, which have told her that woman is dependent on man and cannot be happy without him. She tells Robert “We shall be everything to each other”.
Although Edna begins to take androgyny in a positive direction, her passion for Robert is perilous because it alters rather than resolves her crisis. Instead of building a new hybrid identity that is neither conventionally manly nor womanly, Edna wavers between substituting roles of power with men and subordinating herself once more. As a woman who has just realised her lifeless maintenance of patriarchal dominance, Edna builds up the wrong concept that to be more manly, more dominant, egoistic, and self-indulgent is to attain equality and autonomy. Chopin’s depiction of her tragic heroine is noticeably intertwined with the social context of the modern, post-Victorian period in Western culture. The Awakening portrays the events and outcomes surrounding a time of momentous change taking place at the universal level and oozing out to plague the life of the person.
The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the conventional gender roles of the late 1800’s, through the viewpoint of male supremacy in marriage, with female existence coordinated to a more compliant, or passive position. This story also presents the social relationship between male dominance through accepted “norms” and female “imprisonment”, within the household.
The Essay on Men And Women Society Communication Roles
The evolution of men and women, how the roles in society have changed. Over the last five hundred or so years women have come a long way. We have seen in the Sixteen hundreds arranged marriages where the woman had no say in the union, and the relationships were is based on money or prestige (Shakespeare 1668). Presently we see love is the driving factor. In 1997 a study was done to say forty-six ...
The role of women in society is demonstrated distinctly in the depiction of John’s sister in The Yellow Wallpaper. The woman writes, “There comes John’s sister…I must not let her find me writing. She is a perfectionist and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which makes me sick!” John’s sister is the exemplary woman; one who is pleased with her life, and wishes for no more. John’s wife, however, is revolting on her place in society by writing. This is why she includes the statement “I verily believe …… makes me sick!”
The chief source of the narrator’s mental state is her dictatorial husband who suppresses her emotional and creative inclinations and compels her to focus on the objects that surround her. This apathy shoves her deeper into insanity. John confines her in a room that has no getaway with bars on the windows and fixed bed, which is “nailed down.” Her developing insanity is a form of rebellion and a way to gain her own independence from marriage as well. Her fight to set the woman in the wallpaper free denotes her battle for freedom.
The exclusivity of The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper caused early reviewers to greet it with resentment. People were not ready to wake up to the reality about feminine passion and autonomy. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman saw no joyful end to the women’s urge for autonomy. The narrator’s and Edna’s attainment of freedom brings them depression rather than achievement and bliss. The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening both begin a painful process of “bridging two centuries, two worlds, two visions of gender.” (Dyer, 116)
The turn-of-the-century indeed brings alteration in the roles of women, starting the slow but sure decay of old roles and hopes. Throughout such a period, women experience perplexity and inconsistency. ‘The Awakening” and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ rightly portray the female protagonists as a true turn-of-the-century women, facing crises related to issues of independence, self-hood and gender roles.
