Jennifer Gardner
Y383 Political Thought
Paper #2 Rough Draft
(Enhanced Credit)
April 18, 2002
Oppression and Depression
In both Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale and Charlotte Perkins Gilman s Herland society depends on motherhood and the ability to reproduce. The latter is an utopian novella about an all women society that s civilized beyond even our own, while Atwood s dystopian tale describing a paternal theocracy existing after a national disaster that leaves only a small minority of the women fertile. There are prevalent themes between this story and another of Gilman s stories, The Yellow Wallpaper, which describes the descent of a mother into madness because she s oppressed by her husband.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, a nameless narrator describes the nervous and hysterical condition from which she suffers after the birth of a baby boy. Her husband brings her to an old mansion to get well, and while there, she s troubled by the wallpaper in the room where she s recovering. In fact, she doesn’t recover at all, but slips from sanity by the end of the story. Aside from being a well-written and haunting tale, The Yellow Wallpaper is also a story of a psychological meltdown resulting from an oppressive patriarchal culture. She and her good natured husband, John, are spending the summer together, she sick and he trying to help cure her,. The narrator is an obedient wife who listens to John s suggestion to spend her time resting. John is a doctor used to identifying illnesses by physical symptoms, and if Gilman s protagonist is to be trusted, doesn’t believe his wife is even sick. She s sent to rest in a room that used to be a nursery, with a large old bed that s nailed to the floor, and a haunting and stinking yellow pattern tenaciously fastened to the walls . It isn t long before the woman begins to feel imprisoned in this room with its barred windows and tormented by the complex design on its wallpaper. At first she is only slightly annoyed by its design, but as time progresses and her sanity regresses, an obsession builds up. She starts to see a woman trapped behind the pattern in the wall and considers it her obligation to help set her free.
Gilman does not chose to place her story in an eerie old mansion simply by accident. She and her husband are modern, ordinary people who have traveled to an old estate. The creepy atmosphere is also significant in understanding the story s meaning. Traveling to a place of their ancestors is a bit like traveling back in time, and it s this regression into history that s made the main character subconsciously aware of how out-of-date her treatment is. John is nice enough to her, indeed, he is too nice, wanting to protect her so much he s imprisoning her. In the beginning of the story, she writes, He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction (79).His encouragement for her to use her will and self control illustrate just how much a man of science he actually is, but his behavior is ignorant of just how overwhelming her emotional illness is, referring to her depressions as silly fancies (83). Another oppressive behavior he exhibits is discouraging her from the written word, which has a sort of theraputic effect on her. By the end of the story, when John is questioning her strange behavior, his genuine concern has vanished, at least in his wife s eyes. He pretended to be very loving and kind, but she sees right through him.
What makes Gilman s short story more than mere horror fiction is her use of the metaphor. The woman in the wallpaper she wishes to liberate ends up being herself, but to liberate herself she sacrifices her sanity as well as her sense of identity. In her madness, she sees many women creeping about her room and outside her window, but she can only see them one at a time, as if they are all a reflection of her, trapped behind the strangling pattern of the wallpaper. The wallpaper symbolizes a male dominated culture that encourages women (the narrator included) to accept protection and stay submissive to their husbands. This situation, quite literally in Gilman s tale, drives a woman crazy.
The oppression suffered by the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper doesn t exist for the women in Gilman s other story, Herland. The utopian novel describes a society in which no men are even around to oppress women, and rather than oppressing themselves, the women of Herland get along splendidly. They re visited by three men who at first can t accept the progress they ve made with only half of the sexes. The women aren t bothered by the difficulties that arise from masculine concepts like competition, jealousy, and individuality. The society of Herland instead emphasizes ideas of community and harmony, where a child s upbringing is her education. Problems arise when manhood tarnishes their culture. Terry is a chauvinistic egoist who think women by nature desire to be mastered. Jeff is a kind hearted gentleman who thinks men ought to fawn over and protect their women. And Van, our narrator, is a moderate thinking practical man who understands women more than either of his buddies.
Herland is an oppressive free society until Terry tries to rape his wife, and is banished from the country. Terry put into practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman (113). Although it did result in his wife wishing him killed, the women of Herland saw this as not an offense against a female member of their society, but as an offense against motherhood, which is the essence of Herland. Motherhood was their society s ideology
It s easy to see how Herland might act as the flipside of The Yellow Wallpaper in terms of oppression or the lack thereof. To master one gender implies the dominance of one set of people over another, that much is obvious. But there is a more subtle oppression also going on in these two stories through the characters of Jeff and John. Other than their names being the same length and starting with the same letter, these two men are operating in much the same way. The reader cannot accurately consider them villains but their gentlemanly protectiveness in both stories is unwanted and detrimental. In The Yellow Wallpaper, John s protection and care for his wife is at first justified because she s sick and he is, after all, a physician. But he s naive to her emotional needs because he can only understand illness as a physical malady. The madness she falls victim to is a result of the patriarchal society that s created a world full of Johns. Although protection and care seem an asset for any husband, such qualities stifle female individuality and creativity in a world where many women prefer to take care of themselves. Gilman would argue that the most dangerous sort of oppression exists unnoticed, hiding in a pattern that wallpapers a patriarchal world.
Similarly, Jeff in Herland represents the same type of character. Jeff s difficulty was his exalted gallantry. He idealized women, and was always looking for a chance to protect or to serve them. These needed neither protection nor service (76). He doesn t seem so dangerous in this story because the women cannot fathom the idea of protection, for what on earth would they need protection from? There were no men to oppress women and stronger women had no desire to oppress their weaker sisters. Even criminals were effectively rehabilitated. Ironically they see criminality as a type of social ill, and speak in terms of sending the patient to bed so as to cure social crime (96). But for all the similarities between John and Jeff, there are very few similarities between the Gilman s madwoman and the women in Herland. The madwoman is submissive and fragile, doubtful of her esteem. But the women of Herland are quite different. These were women one had to love up, very high up, instead of down. They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid, inexperienced, weak (120).
There was no such love in Margaret Atwood s A Handmaid s Tale, which differs from Herland in that it s not a utopia at all, but a dystopia. Unlike a utopia, a dystopia describe a place that tries to be ideal but isn t. In Atwood s story, women are stripped of their equal rights, slowly at first. But before long they re prisoners to Gilead, a totalitarian state not afraid to do what totalitarian states do best, use terror to keep power. Those unwilling to cooperate are either hung on the Wall or sent off to the Colonies where death is slower but inevitable. Reading and writing are prohibited, as they are instruments of power. In this way Gilead seems an exaggeration of Gilman s late nineteenth century world. In neither world could women vote, or establish a self identity independent from the men they were obliged to please.
As a result of an environmental disaster, only a minority of the women in The Handmaid s Tale are fertile. Those lucky enough to retain their fertility are given status as Handmaids, which makes them nothing more than two legged wombs in which to carry the young of the next generation. As in Herland, motherhood is a prevalent theme in this book, but not quite so in the same way. In Herland the act of birthing a child was sacred, but it didn t involve any physical domination of men over women, because tere were no men to be dominant. In The Handmaid s Tale the raping of handmaids is justified so as to continue the human race. While Herland is a safe and harmonious place to live, there still exists violence in Gilead, even amongst the women themselves who are jealous and hateful to one another. As a result the ideas of freedom are different in each society..
In Gilead women are segregated even from each other, the infertile Wives from the fertile Handmaids, and both from the poorer Econowives. There is hatred and jealousy amongst the groups of women, particularly between the Wives and Handmaids. Because the women are not united in thought or spirit, they are less likely to rebel, and thus easier to control, or as Terry might say, to master. But this is not to say that freedom doesn t exist in Gilead. As Aunt Lydia tells the girls on page 33, There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to. Now you are given freedom from. This is in response to Gilead s safety. No man dare harm a woman, or even shout obscenities at her whereas in pre-Gilead society women were not safe from violence and harassment on the streets. Freedom to has been sacrificed for freedom from. Gilman s madwoman didn t have much freedom to but she had much freedom from, in the form of protection from her husband. An example of a freedom to in Gilead would be a freedom to have a name, and therefore, a sense of oneself. In keeping her nameless, Gilman is also implying that her narrator has lost a sense of her own identity, similar to Offred and the other Handmaids whose names are only indications of who possesses them. The case is much different in Herland, where the three men try to give their three wives their names. We can at least give them our names, Jeff insisted... Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what good it will do (100). In Herland, the women needn t even sacrifice their freedoms to for safety because their society is quite safe already. But it s unclear how much of a concept of freedom they truly have.
Motherhood, in all three of these stories is significant in the way it changes the women of society. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator s illness is likely due to the birth of a child. Her illness is what leads to her imprisonment which leads to her madness. Even those lucky enough to be fertile in Gilead society are oppressed to the point where their sanity is threatened. But to Herlanders fertility and motherhood is sacred because neither condition results in oppression from another part of society. As a result, society is content and stable, so there aren t any women creeping around Herland and the threat of insanity isn t anywhere to be seen. Both Margaret Atwood and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are expressing similar ideas in different ways. To Atwood, safety is not worth being oppressed in the dystopia of Gilead. To Gilman, a utopia like Herland can only be found where oppression is lost.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid s Tale. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. 1985.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. 1998.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Primus Reader. Political Science Y383 American Political Ideas I. The McGraw-Hill Companies. 2001. pp.78-89.