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Hana O’Neill Dr. Rothenbeck English 2270 May 1, 2017 Mental Illness Related to Gender Roles in The Bell Jar and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Societal expectations related to gender, specifically women, have been an issue that dictates the culture of people’s everyday life. Women have always been expected to be thin, pure, and submissive.  This idea was re-installed after the end of World War II, when wives returned to their households from working independent jobs in factories and sustaining their families while their husbands were away at war.  Throughout Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, it is obvious that Esther’s sufferings from bulimia and depression are linked to societal expectations and how her peers react to it.  Plath uses Esther to showcase what it means to grow up as a woman in the 1900’s and explain her experiences from her own childhood.  Similarly, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator explains how she feels that the woman in the wall is “trapped” by the pattern in the wallpaper.  In this context, Gilman uses the pattern in the wallpaper as a metaphor for the pattern of societal expectation and has it act as a symbol of how women are unable to escape from it.  The Bell Jar and “The Yellow Wallpaper” use mental illness to critique social gender role expectations and women’s position in American culture.   When Esther arrives to New York she is introduced to a corrupt and brainwashed society that states women have to fit a certain description to be happy. Esther’s strife is caused not only by her reaction to society’s ideologies, but also by the women that surround her and how willing they are to conform to it.  Esther is ostracized from her peers due to her unawareness of the expectation of women and the want to be thin and dainty. While all of her co-workers are cutting calories and trying to reduce, Esther binges because it has no effect on her weight.  This is most prominent during the luncheon where Esther consumes copious amounts of food in one sitting.  Plath writes “I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread.  Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off and ate them…. when I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad” (Plath, 28).  Plath fights the dainty vocabulary that is traditionally associated with women by using masculine and, borderline violent, words such as “tackle” or “laid out” (28).  In The Bell Jar, a majority of the women characters conform and accept the ideologies of women during their time, and as Susan S. Lanser describes in her article “Beyond The Bell Jar: Women Students of the 1970s”, they rarely question why those ideologies are in place (Lanser 42).  Esther succeeds in fighting these ideologies by not participating in the extremes her colleges go through to maintain their weight and “womanly” appearances, but ultimately fails by falling into the trap of depression and bulimia and wanting expensive material goods to make her feel beautiful.   The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a major example of women’s lack of representation and equality during early America.  Throughout the short story, Charlotte Gilman decides leave the narrator nameless, but includes the names of her husband, which “suggests [women] are merely representatives for Husbands and In-laws” (Karen Ford, 309).  The two women that Gilman did chose to name are Mary, the name relating back to the virgin Mary who is thought to be pure, who is watching over their child and who’s descriptive quality is that “she is so good with the baby!” (Gilman, 1672), and the narrator’s sister-in-law, who is acting as a housekeeper, Jennie, a word meaning “female donkey” or “beast of burden” (309).  Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband, John, keeps her inside on bed rest when she begins to stray outside the lines of appropriate behavior and appearance for women.  The fact that John had the ability to diagnose his wife for wandering the borders of what he thinks is acceptable and orders her to remain indoors further proves the power and dominance that the male gender holds over women in society throughout history.   Not only are women’s appearances pressured by what society deems is correct, but the qualities women are supposed to encompass are as well.  Women are meant to be pure and clean by abstaining from sexual acts, thoughts, and desires.  Along with that, women are meant to dress in conservative clothing at all times in order to preserve their pureness and help men refrain from taking advantage of them.  In The Bell Jar, Esther challenges societal expectations by wanting to lose her virginity - not for love, but to get even with Buddy.  This desire to lose her virginity is in reaction to when Buddy informs her that he had an affair with “this waitress at the hotel he worked at as a busboy the last summer at Cape Cod” (70).  Esther describes Buddy as “relieved to have somebody to tell about how he was seduced” (70), which is an example of the double standard about the sexuality between men and women.  If Esther was the one who had participated in the affair, she would have been considered unclean and used, while for Buddy, it is not only acceptable, but seems as if he considers it an honor.  Buddy’s lack of shame in his actions is proof of the distinct unfairness between the male and female genders throughout American history.   Another example of the impact a woman’s sexual life has on her reputation is Doreen.  Doreen is sexual, wild, has little to no boundaries, and wears revealing items such as “these full-length lace jobs you could half see through and dressing gowns the color of skin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity” (5).  Esther, along with the rest of society, views Doreen as dangerous and considers her a mistress.  None of these qualities are considered socially acceptable for a woman, nor are associated with qualities an idea wife would possess.  Esther wishes she could act with the confidence of Doreen, yet when she is presented with the idea of taking the initiative to engage in sexual activities with Constantine, she says that he isn’t interested in her wished that he would have “found her interesting enough to sleep with” (83).  While it is a possibility that Constantine wasn’t actually interested in her, Esther may have been convincing herself of it due to society’s constant surveillance of her sexual life, and the fear of how she would be perceived in the future if she did engage in sexual activity with him.   Throughout The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallpaper, both Esther and the narrator are constantly under surveillance by society, their friends, and themselves.  In The Bell Jar Esther is constantly surrounded by mirrors in her everyday life.  Whether it was at Ladies Day Magazine or the Amazon, Esther was never living an un-objectified life.  Plath includes mirrors to symbolize the constant surveillance that women dealt with on a day to day basis, from not only their peers, but their inner conscious as well.  Comparably, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” feels as though she was constantly under surveillance by the woman behind the wallpaper.  The “unblinking eyes” that are “everywhere” (1672) in the wallpaper are used as a metaphor for the eyes of society constantly judging and watching women, and waiting for them to make a mistake.   Along with the eyes in the wallpaper, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also being watched and held captive by her husband and the house that she is trapped in.  Gilman uses several metaphors to represent captivity and to simulate jail.  She mentions how there are windows everywhere, yet they are all barred off, and how the woman in the wallpaper is trapped by the lined pattern.  The barred windows and lined pattern provide another example of being judged and always on review with no escape. Gilman also uses this imagery to further prove that it is not only men who are judging women’s flaws, but other women as well.  At the end of the short story, the narrator tears up the wallpaper piece by piece in attempt to liberate the woman who is trapped.  In doing this, she is shedding light on “her struggle for freedom” (Treichler, 64).  By the end of the story, the narrators husband finds her pacing the room having ripped off the last of the wallpaper, which she then exclaims “you can’t put me back” (1681).  Paula A. Treichler refers to her captivity as “domestic slavery” (64) in her article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”.  Esther experiences a similar situation to the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” in that she is continuously restricted by the rules of the Amazon.  With a strict curfew and daily visits from hotel maids, Esther had no escape from a confined life absent of freedom and adventure.  In the same way, women of the 1900s, and centuries before them, had little liberty, if any, in their lives due to the constricting rules dictating what is and isn’t acceptable, and the endless surveillance that society placed upon them.   Another way that society controls women’s lifestyles throughout history is by deciding what women are responsible and how they should live their lives.  Throughout decades of history, women are thought to be less intelligent and more domestic than men.  Simple phrases such as “house-wife” or “stay-at-home mom” prove this.  At the time the novel takes place, women are still being influenced by what men and society think they are capable of amounting to, and women believe it.  This is shown when Esther imagines life with Constantine as her husband.  She thinks “It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home from living a fascinating day, he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted” (84).  Although Esther knows that she doesn’t want this “dreary and wasted life” considering she is “a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s” (84), she believes that life is inevitable if she ever decides to get married because it is all that she has ever seen.  Esther then proceeds to compare a wife to a kitchen mat, that would eventually be flattened out by the feet of their husband (85).  This degrading idea of women is also present in “The Yellow Wallpaper” when the narrator complains to her husband about feeling ill, and he attributes her depression to post-partum with her child.  He doesn’t believe her when she complains that her illness is deeper than post-partum depression, and then explains that his directions of bed rest with no movement or social interaction is the best medicine since he is a man and a physician, and she is only a woman.  John discredits the narrator’s ability to recognize her own feelings and symptoms solely because she lacks a proper education, thus he believes there is no possible way she would be able to evaluate what illness is and the proper treatment for herself.   John goes as far to treat her as a child, placing her in the old nursery with a bed bolted down to the floor.  By the last day, when John finds the narrator in her room, he sees her crawling around along the walls of the room like a child.   Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are examples of how women have been oppressed by society for the entirety of history and how it has impacted, and continues to impact, their lives.   Whether through never-ending surveillance, or dictating husbands, women find no escape from society’s ideologies and perhaps never will.  Through these works of literature, it is obvious to see the ways society’s unofficial rules and constraints have taken a toll on the female gender, and how Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Gilman hoped to put the culture of America’s past to rest and reconstruct the culture of America’s future.  

Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte P. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, Robert S. Levine, pp 1672-1681.

Ford, Karen. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Women's Discourse.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 4, no. 2, 1985, pp. 309–314., www.jstor.org/stable/463709.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. “Beyond The Bell Jar: Women Students of the 1970s.” The Radical Teacher, no. 6, 1977, pp. 41–44., www.jstor.org/stable/20709092.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print.

Treichler, Paula A. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 3, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 61–77., www.jstor.org/stable/463825.