The roles of women have changed vastly over the last few hundred years. For a long time women had no say in politics, no position in the work force, and no power within the home. We unfortunately get to witness this discriminatory culture depicted in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In this short story, the reader follows a woman in the Victorian era of the United States. It’s a depressing tale of a woman who has a bad case of PTSD, and because her voice is refused to be heard, she eventually goes insane. Nobody listens to the woman because women had no voice in Victorian society. Women were expected to stay at home to cook and clean and take care of the kids. There were no kinds of jobs they could obtain besides being a governess or maid. Women had no voting rights, therefore they had no say in their own government. Their marriage was often times a legal document then a love ceremony, seeing how most of these marriages were arranged and all rights and property was lost by the women to her husband. Women had little choices in their life to make, as it was often made for them. This life the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” had to live was solely based upon her being a women in the late eighteen hundreds. In this paper, I am going to discuss how the roles of a women in a marriage, the law, and the home explain why the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was treated the way she was and how she responded to this treatment.


Women in the Victorian Era were expected to be completely obedient to their husbands. In Joan Perkins book Victorian Women, she says, “The man was protector, chief breadwinner and head of the household. The wife and children were expected to be obedient and submissive to his rules” (73). This quote gives us a very clear idea of the dynamic of a typical marriage in the Victorian Era. The man is expected to have a well paying job that can support his family, while the woman must take care of the children and not question her husband. We read this story through the women’s journal that she must keep secret from her husband. She mentions several times how she thinks doing things and being productive will help her with her sickness, but obeys her husbands wishes when he tells her not to. She does continue to write but behind his back, indicating there could be some deep repercussions for disobeying her husband. The woman was also not allowed to see her child, let alone take care of them. This must have taken a big toll on the woman’s self-esteem, seeing it was expected that the women take care of the children. Overall, the amount of control the husband has over his wife is what ultimately kills her inner self. If he had let her do what she felt would heal her body, she would not have turned insane and still would have been the women he married. 

The law over Victorian women was very strict and unfair. If a women is married, she would have to give up all her property, including future children , to her husband. It is also unfortunate because there was no real way for a women to survive without a husband during these times. A women could not be employed in a high paying job, or most any job for that matter. She could not purchase or own property either, so it is essential she gets married and at a young age too since Victorian women were not given a chance to be independent by the law. The first quote I would like to point out is from Victorian Women by Joan Perkins. In the chapter called “Angels in the house: Marriage and Domestic Life” it says, “Her husband was responsible for her debts and was obliged to support her as she lived with him” (74). As bad as a marriage contract was to the women, the men still had responsibility too. Since women are given no choice but to marry if they want to survive, the husband must take care of her. We see this in “The Yellow Wallpaper” when the husband takes her to a summer home to help her get away from the stresses of life. He makes her follow the rest cure ands other women come in to help with the household chores. This may be because he truly loves his wife, but if he was expected by society and the law to take care of her, even when she is not herself anymore, it explains why he goes through the effort of trying to help her instead of leaving. Also in this chapter, I would like to discuss another quote where it says: “Upper-class wives were usually protected from the harshness of the common law, which assumed that all husbands were kind, wise, caring, responsible, hard-working, and fair - and conversely, that all women were child-like or imbeciles” (76). I found this quote to be very helpful in understand the text more. Government, and therefore society, looked at women as though they were dumb and imaginative. A women being imaginative isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead people to believe you less than they normally would. This explains why most laws at the time required women to not be responsible or hold any power. This also explains why John (the husband) belittled his wife’s mental state. If all women were overly-emotional and oblivious to life than he must have thought his wife didn’t have anything seriously wrong with her, she was just being a woman. 

The last topic I would like to bring up revolves around the Victorian women and the home. When the woman was not cooking or cleaning and had some spare time, she would usually dance, write, read, play cards, and sew. There were not many things at all she could do that were acceptable forms of leisure for women. If the lives of women were already considered to be very boring and dull, than the life of the woman we read about in this short story must have had the most dreary time in her house. She has no other choice but to fixate on things like the wall, for there is literally nothing else to do. Boredom causes her imagination to run wild and eventually cause her to become possessive and fixated on the walls of the old nursery. One quote that I would like to discuss in this paper comes from Lydia Murdoch in her book Daily Life of Victorian Women. It says: “Men selected and purchased many household items and were often deeply invested in their domestic worlds, but by the mid-19th century as middle class income rose, women primarily oversaw the increasingly ornate decorating decisions” (95).  This quote explains to us why the woman first fixated on the ugly wallpaper. She wants the home to look pretty and she has much more freedom to decorate now than she would have in the early eighteen hundreds. This may have contributed to the fact that her husband didn’t take her illness seriously. He just thought she was being a women as she obsesses over the aesthetics of her new home. Unfortunately, her obsession over the wallpaper grew to be something that was life consuming and he didn’t realize it until too late. This next quote explains to us a little deeper about her initial fixation on the wallpaper. Murdoch says, “Household purchases became signs of individual expression, moral character, and status, rather than dangerous examples of sinful materialism, underscoring the public as well as private meanings of domestic consumption” (95). This explains why the woman wanted to examine and understand the wallpaper. At this time in history decorating the home was a type of self expression, therefore it would tell her about the past of the house. The wallpaper is described as very ugly and gloomy. This may have bothered her because it could be interpreted that the previous owners were unhappy people. She may be afraid that she will turn to be unhappy like the previous owners. Adding more worries to her already veery nervous self.

The Yellow Wallpaper encapsulates the views on Victorian women using the story of a woman who is diagnosed with nervous depression. We see how the woman’s needs were ignored and how it eventually led to the loss of ones sanity. Her place in her marriage, law, and home only set her back even though that is what is deemed best for her. Through the misogyny this woman must go through in order to be an obedient wife and member of society, its turns out to  only hurt her in the end. 
