The 'Female Malady' in Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the imposed confinement of Gilman's heroine in "The Yellow Wallpaper" drives her to insanity as a means of liberation and how in contrast, Walker's heroine in "The Color Purple" goes through rage to achieve hers. It discusses how form contributes, in Gilman's story, to represent the 'female malady' as insanity and in Walker's novel, to represent it as liberating rage.

From the Paper:

"The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story covering, chronologically, one summer. The protagonists spend it in a house in the countryside as part of the medical treatment prescribed to the heroine for her "nervous depression" (Gilman, p. 348), diagnosed by her husband and her brother, both physicians. The heroine spends most of this period in one room, deemed by her husband as the most suitable (given her "condition") and which she dislikes from first sight because of its yellow wallpaper. The isolation and, mainly, the prohibition to work (write), slowly drive her to insanity."

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