Gender Roles in The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper
Uploaded by menkash on Apr 12, 2006
Gender Roles in The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper
‘The Awakening’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ must first and foremost be understood in their historical framework. By the turn of the century, journals, art galleries, and works of fiction were swamped with notions about how to be a proper woman in middle class society. With industrialization, urbanization, declining birth rates, amplified divorce rates, the shift away from the home and the rise in the number of single men and women in the professional class, Americans dreaded that their families would disintegrate. Thus, one of the most important changes to American culture in the late 19th century was the change in the perception and illustration of gender roles.
Besides the changes in social order, Americans experienced intense economic modifications. Large corporations replaced small family businesses and people were reliant on their employers. The gap between the rich and the poor radically increased. These changes resulted in an understanding of the home as the last refuge for traditional values for both men and women.
Despite the new feminist activism inspired in part by women's roles in the Abolitionist movement, as well as the Temperance and Suffrage movements, women were supposed to exemplify the conventional values represented by the home. In this way, women were associated with the home; both were emblems of the ethics Americans hoped to maintain. The home turned out to be a female gendered domestic space in which women, as the custodians of customs and ethics, both obtained and lost power.
Glorified as morally better members of society who would protect the family from the harms of business and modernity, women were expected to be chaste, benevolent, self-sacrificing, cultivated, cheerful, compassionate, well-read in the appropriate fields and economical. This structure of womanhood empowered women to become more educated and handle household finances, while also restraining them through firm rules regarding what they read, how the home should be maintained, how to act in public, and all other measures that could be interpreted as a manifestation of the family's ethics. Most significantly, by relegating women to the conjugal sphere, many women were barred from the new economy and therefore were more and more reliant on their husbands for income. Without the establishment of the separate female gendered domestic sphere, the process of developing a male centered corporate culture would not have been probable.
During the 19th century, domesticity was romanticized in literature, mostly in literature...