“Out at Last!”: A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Abstract

Central to the feministic theories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the emancipation of women from being seen as economically dependent to men, and from the “middle class ideal of domestic femininity” (Robertson, 2018). This paper attempted at stylistically analyzing one of Gilman’s most famous works, The Yellow Wallpaper, drawing on the transitivity framework of Halliday (1968), and assisted by the underpinning on feminist stylistics by Mills (1995 as cited in Montoro, 2014). Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was analyzed through the material and mental processes with which the narrator encoded her worldview and experiences in the story. The excerpted lines were stylistically examined within the parameters of feminism, lending a dark warning on the consequences of gender stereotype and prejudice on another’s mental health. The analysis revealed the allegory of the yellow wallpaper in the narrator’s makeshift asylum, depicting how women are supposedly trapped in marriages that seem to diminish their roles to a “domestic housewife” and inferior to the husband. The narrator’s material and mental processes unraveled her wanting to be, and eventual freedom from the stereotypes of the world she lived in. The same analysis also provided for the use of such language resources towards a stylistically fuller, and socially aware understanding and appreciation of a literary text. Implications drawn from this study touched on the use of feminist stylistic lenses to bring forth relevant social issues to enrich the study and teaching of literary pieces in the classroom; and on the psychology of gender-based stereotyping and bias against women in particular, and other genders in general.