Feminist Psychological Perspectives on Female Oppression in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Short Story

Abstract

Although The Yellow Wallpaper has been extensively examined through feminist and psychological perspectives, relatively few studies have explicitly integrated feminist literary criticism with feminist psychology to explain how patriarchal oppression is transformed into internalized psychological oppression within the narrator’s consciousness. Addressing this gap, this study investigates the relationship between patriarchal authority, domestic confinement, and the narrator’s psychological transformation in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Employing qualitative textual analysis informed by feminist literary criticism and feminist psychology, the study analyzes narrative descriptions, characterization, symbolism, and representations of power embedded in the text. The findings demonstrate that patriarchal oppression operates through three interconnected mechanisms: the medicalization of female experience, domestic isolation imposed under the guise of care, and the internalization of patriarchal authority that gradually fragments the narrator’s identity. Rather than functioning solely as a symbol of confinement, the yellow wallpaper represents the narrator’s transition from psychological subjugation to symbolic resistance against patriarchal control. These findings reveal that the narrator’s psychological collapse constitutes a form of resistance generated by the contradictions of patriarchal domination rather than merely an individual mental disorder. The study contributes theoretically by strengthening the integration of feminist literary criticism and feminist psychology in literary analysis, while empirically offering a more nuanced interpretation of the interplay between patriarchal discourse, psychological oppression, and symbolic resistance in The Yellow Wallpaper.