Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

Conclusion

In both written texts, it becomes evident that the protagonists’ respective men were a facilitator and constant driving factor to their insanity. The two authors showed the antagonists and their subjugation towards the protagonists. The exerted control over both women, took away their free will and essentially reduced them to prisoners or slaves. Not only were these women oppressed by the men in their lives, but they were disconnected from society due to their unique way of thinking and expressing themselves. They were literally and metaphorically locked away from the rest of the world. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper wished to express her feelings in a form of writing but was forbidden to do so. All Antoinette wanted to find was love but instead she got caught up in Mr. Rochester’s hunger for more power and prestige. Through the use of psychological realistic descriptions of Antoinette and the unnamed protagonist along with the inanimate objects, both Charlotte Gilman and Jean Rhys were able to exhibit how the male antagonists in these two stories were the main contributing factors of the ‘women’s madness’. The inanimate objects being the love potion in Wide Sargasso Sea which Antoinette used to ‘make’ her husband love her, delivered a clear image of ‘madness’ of possessive paranoia across to the readers. The love potion was also a representation of Antoinette’s alienation and loss of identity when she was being shooed away by the people around her in the community, even by her own husband. Similarly, in The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper in the nursery where the protagonist was imprisoned in to convey the lunacy as a complex matter due to the limitations of the feminine role in the text, such as her lack of decision making, forbidden from taking care of her own child and being treated like toddler. Not only does the wallpaper depict the unnamed protagonist’s insanity but it was a reflection of her intellectual and social restrictions. The impacts of these two inanimate objects along with literary devices like polysyndeton, asyndeton, and especially imagery which helped embolden the idea of the effects of male patriarchy on women that Rhys and Gilman have employed. The choice of a

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