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The Yellow wallpaper and Trifles The two themes I would like to discuss in this essay are The Suffering of Women in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Feminist Criticism of Susan Glaspell's Trifles. The Yellow Wallpaper is the type of story that represents the suffering of all women of the world. The story tells us how its narrator is suppressed by her husband and brother, though they are trying to do good for her. Medical science also suppresses her because of its views on women's health in the Nineteenth century. They keep her from doing the things she wants because they believe it is best for her to rest.
She disagrees. "I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, Would do me good. " (p. 801) The narrator tries to convince her husband that this sort of treatment is not working for her, but he does not pay attention and sends her to bed. This incident shows us that she does not know what is best for herself, even for her mental health. She has no idea why and what is happening, she just asks questions like "And what can one do?" or "But what does one do? Possibly the cause for her mental problems is in the fact that she is trying to prevent her emotions from coming out to escape discrimination. It is considered wrong for a woman to openly show her anger of discontent. She admits that sometimes she gets unreasonably angry with John.
John tells her not to "neglect proper self control." So she is not allowed to express herself in speech nor in her writing, which I think she used as a release. I believe it is this inner-battle with doing what is considered proper and what she wants to do that slowly drives her crazy. The wallpaper and the figure behind it is symbolic of women's suffrage. She says the figure is "like a woman stooping down and creeping about. " and "shakes the pattern as if she wanted to get out. On the last page she says, "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?" Gilman wrote this based on her depression experience, but she managed to include the feelings of all women and their struggles. When we think about the word feminist, one usually imagines the modern womens movement.
Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, was written in 1916, long before the modern women's movement began, yet her story reveals, through Glaspell's use of formal literary conventions, the role that women are expected to play in society, and the harm that it brings not only the women, but the men as well. If you want to understand the story Trifles, you should point out and understand the two main metaphors in the play. One is the bird cage metaphor. Mrs. Hale describes Minnie (before her marriage to John) as "kind of like a bird herself real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and fluttery" (Glaspell 74). Both Mrs.
Hale and Mrs. Peters look for Minnie's bird cage in cupboard, but do not understand the significance of this until they find the dead bird. The comparison here is between Minnie and the bird. The bird is caged just as Minnie is trapped in the abusive relationship with John. John Wright figurative strangles the life out of Minnie like he literally strangles the bird. The bird / bird -cage metaphor is also representative of the role women are forced into in society, the bird being women and the cage being the male dominated society.
The other major metaphor is the quilt. The quilt represents Minnie's life. The question that is asked about the quilt is whether Minnie was going to 'quilt it or just knot it" (Glaspell 73). This is the decision that Minnie had to make.
She either would quilt it, meaning that she would go on enduring the isolation and abuse or she would knot it and decide that her life as it exists was "not it" and she would do something to change it. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters begin to understand and agree with Minnie as they see how John treated her, and how she is being treated by the law. The feminist way of Trifles was never meant to be subtle. Glaspell uses the formal elements in the play to help convey the feminist theme.
The title, the character names, and the metaphors all work together to paint not only a picture of Minnie's life with John, but by extension the lives of all women who live oppressed under male domination. Trifles are not just a reflection, however. It is also a call for women to use their perceived powerlessness as a tool to manipulate the system, and a warning to men that a system where one segment of the population dominates and oppresses another cannot and will not be tolerated forever. Bibliography: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed.
Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998 Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work by Veronica Makowsky. Oxford University Press, 1993.
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