Year: 2025 | Month: December | Volume: 12 | Issue: 12 | Pages: 33-36
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20251204
Critical Analysis and Feminist Reading of the Yellow Wallpaper
Dr. Aishwarya J S
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jain (Deemed-to-be University), Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
ABSTRACT
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an icon of feminist criticism of literature and medical humanities. It is a critical revision of the story that re-reads the text considering current feminist and medical-humanities perspectives and bases the argument on the more recent, Scopus- Indexed scholarly publications published since 2019. Through the analysis it is revealed how domestic medical authority, gendered epistemologies and pathologising female subjectivity are simulated in the story through the confinement of the narrator and his ultimate breakdown. Based on the recent medical-humanities-related research that links the Gilmanian critique to the modern-day clinical studies and the mental-health practice (Villar, 2024; Watson, 2021), and the recent literary studies that locate the Gilmanian afterlives in the texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Gaskill, 2020; Maxey, 2023), the paper contends Gilman stages madness as both the symptom of oppression and an unclear mode of resistance. The hidden writing of the narrator, her interpretations of the wallpaper, and the dramatic moment of defying the paper collectively together give a narrative that is interrogative of the patriarchal domination of the female body, knowledge, and creativity.
Keywords: Feminist criticism, patriarchy, confinement, mental health, symbolism, women's identity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
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