Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Outrageous Anger Towards "Unheard of Contradictions"

Victorian men and women in the late nineteenth-century America faced a bewildering and conflicting array of roles forced upon them by a newly industrialized society, attempting to formulate a middle-class ethic. Both men and women suffered from nervous disorders. Charlotte Perkin's Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" represents a complex work of art as well as an effective indictment of the nineteenth-century relationship between male physicians and female patients and the sexual politics which underlies that relationship. The strong conflicts between authority and subordinate, sexual expression and repression may have been more tense than in the early nineteenth-century. Hence the medical treatment can be signified as a weapon in a social and political struggle for power between the sexes. This paper studies how Gilman criticizes a physician's mastery over nervous disorders of women in Victorian America, further explores how Gilman's narrator rebels against the male authority that physician symbolizes.