“The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Little Room”

As I read “The Yellow Wallpaper” By Charlotte Perkins Gilman I questioned greatly about the narrator’s state of mind. In the reading the narrator acknowledge that she is sick, but by observing the reading, which is the narrator’s thoughts in her dairy, I detected that the narrator is fully aware of her surrounding, behavior, and actions. In the reading she documents her observations of the yellow wallpaper and of John and Jennie while also intelligently planning her behavior appropriately around John in order to reach her goal of freeing the girl from the wallpaper. Her actions and behavior clearly states that she is aware of the surroundings and the people around her; therefore this leads to the conclusion that the narrator is not sick or crazy, but only in the view of John did the narrator seemed sick and needed help. Linking this conclusion to “The Little Room” by Madelene Yale Wynne, I noticed the pattern of women’s minds being questioned by men. In “The Little Room” Margaret, along with her mother, did not receive the positive acknowledgement that they expected from their husbands about the little room. The men in these two readings do not acknowledge or believe in the women, but rather they disregard the women’s opinions and belittle them. The men’s opinions about the women in the readings consist of “sick”, “imaginative”, and “nonsense” which eventually changed the mood of the women and manipulate the women in the readings to think differently of themselves by questioning their own knowledge and reality.