July 27, Gilman & Wharton

“The Yellow Wall Paper” was a very strange story. An inanimate object, old yellow wallpaper, becomes the narrator’s crazed obsession. She first hates it and then soon becomes infatuated with it, begins studying it and seeing women in it. This wallpaper, which does cover the walls, could be considered a metaphor for the confinement and domestic imprisonment many women suffered back that time. “But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much. John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.” John is painted as the male chauvinistic captor who plays into the confinement and medication of our narrator’s entrapment. Eventually she kills herself. I felt that she was deemed sick for not being a stereotypical woman and was neglected because of it.

In Wharton’s “Roman Fever” women set of to Rome in search of wealthy husbands. At the time the Great Depression was crippling America’s economy and so they felt their chances of finding rich men in Europe was better. A “gold digger” is a negative connotation, but an older American society also made it very hard for women to be independently successful. They were expected to receive limited education for low-level jobs and merely be housewives. This has become a survival technique, one of very few options to better themselves. “As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather surprised—they wondered as it being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me.” It seems like a catch 22 for men to expect women to rely on men for money then frown at them for using it merely to get ahead.