ABSTRACT
This passage from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The YellowWallpaper (1892) presents a number of important issues concerning sexual difference. In particular, it dramatizes conventional presuppositions about the differences between men and women. The phrase ‘of course’ may signal that the first sentence is satirical and ironic, but the implication remains: a woman is subordinate to her husband and cannot expect to be taken seriously. The differences between men and women, in this passage, are primarily a matter of recognizing certain kinds of gender stereotypes. Such stereotypes depend to a considerable extent on a conceptual opposition: man versus woman. And, like other binary oppositions, this involves a hierarchy. John, the man, is active, ‘practical’, dominant, unemotional. The narrator, the woman, appears to be passive, non-practical, subordinate, emotional. The opposition between the man and the woman is underscored by the insistent stress on the man’s actions, qualities and characteristics (John does this, John is such-and-such) and the corresponding absence of information regarding the woman. Gilman is exposing a hierarchy, in other words, involving the
dominance of the man and the subordination of the woman. The Yellow Wallpaper has become something of a modern classic as regards the literary representation of women and the idea of what Elaine Showalter has called, in a book of that name, ‘A Literature of Their Own’.
