1. Both The Yellow Wallpaper and The Bloody Chamber deal with the perennial feminist theme of the confinement of women in particular rooms, chambers, houses and roles. Essay

1. “Both ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’ deal with the perennial feminist theme of the confinement of women in particular rooms, chambers, houses and roles”. Discuss.


This is essay attempt to discuss the role of the women in literature, both about the protagonists and the authors of the stories. As an example two influential short stories will be discussed in depth in order to shed light into the lives of the two authors and their stories.

The short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and Angela Carter (1940–1992) both sideway the same idea; the confinement of women in particular roles and positions in both personal and professional lives, posed on them by patriarchal figures. Toril Moi quotes in her examination of feministic criticism, Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), Elaine Showalter’s idea that “women writers should not be studied as a distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances distinctively feminine” (Moi, 2002: 49), which comes across when reading the two stories which are stylistically already very different. It might be so that a feminist reader of both times (there’s some 80 years difference between the two stories) did not only want to see her own experiences mirrored in fiction, but strived to identify with strong, impressive female characters (Moi, 2002: 46), and looked for role-models that would instil positive sense of feminine identity by portraying women as self-actualising strong identities who were not dependent on men (Moi, 2002, 46). The two stories bring out two female characters, very different by position and character; the other a new mother, scared and confused of her own role, and the other a young newly-wed girl, still a child, being fouled by a much older man, mainly as a mark of his authority over women in general.

The readers of feminist literature were demanding authenticity, which for them superseded all other requirements (Moi, 2002: 46), and...