Fitzgerald openly shows his opinion that women generally have low moral qualities, and demonstrates this by the actions and speech illustrated by the three main female characters in the novel; Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Myrtle Wilson. His portrayal of them appears to expose a disturbing, misogynistic view of women in the 1920’s. Others would say this is not the case and his approach to how he presents the women has a much deeper meaning therefore implying that Fitzgerald could in fact be a feminist. In my essay I will discuss how I feel that Fitzgerald’s experiences with women are mirrored throughout the novel and undoubtedly display his general ‘underlying hatred’ for the female kind in the Jazz Age through his constant implications of the negative characteristics women possess. Like the central character of The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald had an intensely romantic imagination; he once called it "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life."
This sets up the binary opposition of male and female, which helps mold the main tenant of Jane’s interpretation of the wallpaper: there is a woman being held back by complexities. It fits into the binary opposition insofar as the woman is held back by her desires and complexities because the man forces her to repress them. Beauvoir explains that women are confronted with binary oppositions as far as what a woman is. (1266) She says that, “if woman is depicted as the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, the Demon, then it is most confusing to
She reflects her feelings of imprisonment by her husband, onto how she interprets the wallpaper. While she continues to find meaning in it, she becomes more and more insane. Eventually, Jane starts to feel as if the wallpaper is watching her. While she starts to decode it, she discovers a woman trapped in the bars of the pattern. The woman stuck in the wallpaper does circles and is sometimes able to crawl out through the window.
Hamilton goes on to explain why her dislike of the jingo woman is so strong; “you make all women seem church duffers!” she implies the Jingo woman is seen as unintelligent, criticising why her opinions are wrong and that this view of her is being applied to all women. She disagrees with the way women like the jingo woman portray other women. She portrays the Jingo woman and her role in the war, in a negative light. In ‘women at munitions making’ by Mary Gabrielle, Gabrielle criticises women’s munitions work as unnatural. The word ‘coarsened’ implies that the women’s relationship with birth and life is tainted by munitions work and its association with death.
In her introduction she starts with the issue of women identification. The way I see women identification is very much different then she sees it. What I understood from the introduction is she made clear sense about the complication of social and real identity. Trinh T. Minh-Ha is saying women often find out a separate identity, but it always get stuck with the social construction and social “secondhand” memory. If women try to explain herself it becomes very complex with unclear ideas because of cultural codes, representations and then the sense of real identity lose its words.
Feminism is accused of essentializing what it is to be a woman and what womanhood means. The larger category of women has indeed been a threat to a woman as an individual. Women have indeed been a threat to the individual woman. Every woman is individual just like every man is an individual. To say that women have been oppressed is an oversimplification and it is a category that has been arbitrarily for the purpose of representing this womanhood that it is as though she does not already exist.
After coming to full realization of who the woman who was creeping was, she states “I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?” (Gilman) The connection that was already made by the reader has been made by the narrator and she was the women who was always “stooping and creeping” around. Then she knows that there are many more women who are in the exact same situation. She asks herself if they had to struggle the same way she did? Were they trapped within their homes as if they were prisons?
The wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls is used to symbolize the sphere because she is unable to break free from the room, like the narrator who is imprisoned and unable to escape without being strangled by the bars of social expectation. The wallpaper is the thing that the narrator exercises her imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and started actively studying and decoding its meaning. She unties its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. As her insanity gradually deepens, she is preoccupied with one woman behind the wallpaper and identifies completely with this woman, believing that she is also trapped within the bar-like pattern of the wallpaper.
A door that once kept her shut-off from the outside world, not shuts out society’s view of women and their place in the world. “Iv got out at last...in spite of you!” (70). The narrator of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' has been driven into psychological madness through the imprisonment of male dominance. Gilman's use of symbolism to portray patriarchal dominance, through locked doors and bared windows, has been an effective way to communicate the suffering and trapped feeling of women during the 19th century. While many women would be to afraid to question their role in society and in marriage, Gilman has created a strong female protagonist who overcomes her husbands authoritative
She was determined to get her mind off of her sickness and become healthy again that she sat in her room with no company and obsessed over the paper. In Gilman’s real life she used writing to fill her emptiness through her depressed states of being in society during earlier times; when men were looked upon to fend for the family and basically run women’s lives. Works Cited Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays. The Yellow Wallpaper. The Norton Introduction to Literature.