Two masks of a woman: Homemaker & Creeper

The history of women surviving in society can only be described as miserable, painful, and many times a lonely story. Let us go back in time, and stop in the 1800's. Women were seen as property. The African American men  gained the right to vote before white women, yet white women were thought more highly of. How is this you ask? I wish I understood myself. Women were thought of as precious fragile beings who needed to be taken care of by either her father, or if married; her husband. They were property in a patriarchal society. Forced into domestic duties prescribed to them. Only to slowly descend into madness. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman; being a victim of one of the many oppressive methods of women; known as Silas Weir Mitchell's, "Rest Cure". Gillman exposes the harsh realities and affects of the "Rest Cure" that many spirited women were forced to endure in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. 

Perhaps this Gothic horror best displays the horrific events of one woman who is slowly losing her sanity while being forced to rest in a room with a horrific reminder of her imprisonment as a woman. Gillman's chilling words "I don't like to look out of the windows even- there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did? " (Gillman 327), shows the horrifying descent into madness. The narrator truly believes that women are escaping from the wallpaper, the horrifying, restricting wallpaper. When she writes "I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow." (Gillman 327). The narrator has finally recognized that she is one of those creeping women. The women who long to break free of the ghastly yellow wallpaper that one may infer is Gillman's depiction of the patriarchal society in which they live in. As Gillman conveys, it is only human to desire to be free. It is part of the human condition.