Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

Charlotte Gilman, enrich the reader’s understanding of how the complex effects of male subjugation of females can lead to madness.

The sense of disconnection from society

Women in these novels feel disconnected from regular society and both novels explore how this occurs. Gilman and Rhys both link this disconnection to patriarchy. Madness and colonialism are the central concerns in both Jane Rhys and Charlotte Gilman’s written texts. (Tennholt, 2005) In this colonized and male dominated society, Jean Rhys managed to produce a top selling novel addressing this issue while Gilman in her own words had said that the short story was “ not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked”. (Lavender, 1913) In Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, she portrays the unnamed protagonist’s sense of disconnection from her society by drawing parallels between society and her immediate surroundings. The protagonist initially describes the house as “quite alone…with hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses”. This polysyndeton reflects her mental state. Upon her first sight of the house she has already expressed her discomforts as she feels like “there is something strange about the house” which is later reinforced by the isolation and deep sense of loneliness that she felt while living in the house. The protagonist was not only physically separated as she wasn’t allowed visitors and mostly trapped in her room, but she was also mentally detached as her husband diagnoses her with “temporary nervous depression”. John repressed the protagonist from expressing her feelings through writing as he believes that the writing will only stimulate her deranged imagination further. However, the first-person voice of the protagonist convinces the readers that “if [she] were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest [her mind]” which displayed the idea of disconnection from the world as she is imprisoned like a child. John disregarded her wish to stay in the room of her choice and instead put her in the upstairs nursery with the floor “scratched and gauged and

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