I’d
like to share my opinions upon A Room of
One’s Own and Yellow Wallpaper.
There are many aspects in common between these two masterpieces.
To
begin with, I’d like to talk a little about the tragic experience of the two
writers. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of Yellow Wallpaper, experienced a terrible
treatment on her mental unhealthy condition. The doctor let her think nothing
to relax herself to deal with her unhealthy emotion, which caused a terrible side
effect and almost made her mad. Fortunately, Gilman found it wrong and
recovered gradually, and wrote the novel based on her own experience. Virginia Woolf,
the author of A Room of One’s Own, suffered
from her brother and unfair experience in the whole society. Both of them
expressed their powerlessness and strong willing to change the state of female by
their words in their books.
Secondly,
I’d like to compare some similar viewpoints insides these two books. One of the
most important sentences in A Room of One’s
Own is “woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction”. In my opinion, money and room here can be understood as the
actual things, but I believe they also represent some deeper meanings. Look
into the examples or stories in this book, we could figure out that some female
writers have enough money and their rooms, but after their writing, they became
mad because of the accusations and bias from the whole society. Hence, I think
money and room do have deeper implication. They represent the real freedom of women.
Woolf hoped the voice of women could be powerful in the society, and two
genders could be equitable. Also, we could find similar point in Yellow Wallpaper. The young woman in Yellow Wallpaper loves writing, but his
husband prevented her from writing even a single word when she started to perform
just a little abnormally, in order to “treat” her, which made her mad at last.
This story shows the weakness of women’s voice and the unfairness between two
genders in the society that time. The writer appealed the equality of two genders.
Hi Yu, I agree with your idea that the money and room means more than actual things in their expressions. Money and room are objective boundaries that may limit women writers freedom to write, but more importantly, it is the social normal and bias for women's role that is the actual boundaries of their developments. Even if women have enough money and space, they are still constrained from express them freely and do what they really want.
ReplyDeleteHi Yu,
ReplyDeleteI pretty agree with your idea that money and room represent the real freedom of women. Since actually most women do not have much time of their own, because they have to do much heavy housework. However, most men have much more freedom than women. It seems that the personal thoughts of women are quite less important than men’s. Therefore, both of the writers intend to emphasize the importance of the freedom of women and the equality between men and women.