Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a good role model for kids nowadays, but was born in the time period. She was ahead of her time period with the publication of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, because of her progressive nature towards women. She was the poster girl for the early start of feminism. Her writing is notable because of her personal insights, which she portrayed through her fictional characters. Charlotte’s father left when she was a child, abandoning her and her family at a young age. Her dad abandoning her lead to, Charlotte herself, abandoning her own family in the future. This is because Gilman’s marriage was a disaster, which is when she got severely depressed. She was supposedly found to have “female hysteria,” and sentenced to bed rest, which meant that she could do nothing until she was better. (Beekman). This experience is what helped her write her most famous essay called, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The narrator of the story goes through a similar situation as Gilman. This essay is praised for being a feminist writing because of how the narrator escapes the oppressive nature of her husband. Through the similar life stories between Gilman and the narrator in the short story, it can be observed that feminism was happening during the Victorian era through domestic affairs.

Feminism was becoming prominent in Victorian America in 1890. Feminism back in this time period was a lot different than feminism in our modern time. Domestic feminism was the type of female power that was used to get ahead in society and is what started the feminist movement. Women were starting to discover that they had power in the household, which gives women autonomy domestically. In “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America”, by Daniel Smith, he argues that,

Instead of postulating woman as an atom in competitive society, domestic feminism viewed woman as a person in the context of relationships with others. By defining the family as a community, this ideology allowed women to engage in something of a critique of male, materialistic, market society and simultaneously proceed to seize power within the family. (53).

Smith shows here that women could not gain autonomy in society; as it was too competitive with male influence. However, within the household, women had autonomy by her power over her children. This means that if the relationship within the family is strong between a mother and her children, she will have more power over them than the father, giving her more autonomy in their raising. The mother is gaining equality through her role as a mother. Smith also explains why women were gaining power domestically with this passage, “Men had inordinate power within the Victorian family, but it was as husbands-not as fathers. The conservative conception of woman's role focused, after all, on the submissive wife rather than the submissive daughter.” (48). This quote shows how women had some power by father’s being in control of his wife and his wife being in control of the children. Men were only judged by how they controlled their wife and women were judged by how they controlled the children. The mom in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was not given the chance to control her child since John did not let her near their child and took her away from society. This only made her worse, showing how important domestic feminism was. By women having more power over the children, this gave women autonomy and the beginnings of the rise of feminism through domestic affairs.

Even though domestic feminism is a small step to total equality, big things have small beginnings. There were some effects to domestic feminism. Whenever men recognized the autonomy women were gaining, some of the men would try to stop it by taking away women’s control of domestic duties and in Gillman’s case by putting her on bed rest. Women were used to taking control of the house and children, so when that was taken away from them, it would only make things worse for the woman. She would either go crazy, which was seen as female hysteria, or experience a form of depression. A woman who is accustomed to domestic power cannot just lose it all without some effect. In “Gender Differences in Depression: Explanations from Feminist Ethics”, by Robyn Bluhm, she explains that women get depressed over stereotyped expectations men place on women who might have seized a little too much power because, “these ‘stereotyped expectations’ are not merely imposed on girls and young women in the process of becoming persons; they are accepted and internalized by them.” (80). This means that women do not get depressed because of their husband’s power, but rather due to the misogynist actions towards women that women accept. Domestic feminism started to relieve women of the expectations women had from society, but when women lost this role within the family it would make them depressed. Bluhm also states that, 

“it is important to recognize that there is something genuine in their response. Meyers’s ‘partial access autonomy’ suggests that it is possible both for us to uncritically adopt gender-specific beliefs, values, and behaviors that we learned as children and for these beliefs, values, and behaviors to be genuine expressions of ourselves.” (84).

This quote means that women accept the feelings that they feel. How women react is how they genuinely feel. So, even if a woman grows up surrounded by misogyny, her feelings are real though it might not seem like the right feelings to have in a oppressive situation. No one can change a woman’s true emotions except for the woman herself. This shows that if a woman were to get depressed, this is how she actually feels and that these feelings are not imposed on her, giving women still a partial autonomy of how she feels. This autonomy of a woman’s feelings and domestic feminism can lead her to escape the confines of some female oppression.

The effect of taking away domestic feminism and being able to escape female oppression is the reason why “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a famous feminist story. The narrator got her domestic duties taken away from her, which led to her depression, but she was able to free herself from this in the end. The narrator genuinely feels depressed when she says, “I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (Gilman 300). This shows why the narrator is depressed, because she wants to think independently but submits to her husband’s diagnosis because she accepts how her husband makes her feel bad. This proves Bluhm’s point on how women actually feel is what makes them depressed. The narrator has a type of depression called post-partum depression. This is evident when she mentions the child she just had. The narrator states, “It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him” (Gilman 301-302). The narrator here is shown to have lost her domestic responsibilities, which was to care for the children. Domestic responsibilities should give the narrator some autonomy, but when that is taken away from her, it leads to her post-partum depression. In the end though, she escapes her husband’s oppression by making him stop making her feel so bad. She officially escapes when she says, “‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Gilman 312). The narrator feels that she is free from her depression and can have some of her autonomy back. She is finally free because she accepts her feelings that she has escaped.

With the cultural and historical background of Victorian America, the influences of that time can be seen and better understood. The time period reflected in the story describes where women stood in society and how they were treated, and reveals how the narrator was not treated too. This leads her to depression. How the time period treats women with depression and mental illness is better understood with background knowledge. Treatments such as “bed rest” were not uncommon, but in the story of, “The Yellow Wallpaper” you get to see how destructive this could be. What is even more horrifying is the how similar this story is to the author’s actually life story. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a reflection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both Gilman and the narrator had their recently realized domestic feminism taken away, causing depression, but both were able to overcome that and escape. If the narrator is a reflection of Gilman, then “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also a reflection of Gilman’s time period. The Victorian time period was the beginning of feminism in America, but the effects of this movement shows there is still a long way to go before women started to become more equal to men in society.

