Gender Roles – the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Gender Roles”
By definition gender-role is “a term used in the social sciences and humanities to denote a set of behavioral norms that accompany a given gendered status (also called a gendered identity) in a given social group or system. Gender is one component of the gender/sex system, which refers to “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are satisfied” (Reiter 1975: 159).” From a tender age, girls are taught to depend on men for social and economical happiness. Boys on the other hand are taught they have to be the providers. There has always been one set of standards that apply to men, and another set applying to women. This is evident all throughout society including literature. Such are the cases in Alice Munros “Boys and Girls” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In “Boys and Girls,” through the portrayal of a young, unnamed female narrator and her brother Laird –meaning “lord” – Munro relates the adversities and successes of the rite of passage into adulthood in the 1940s. Just from looking at details such as the meaning of the brothers name, the reader is able to sense the unfairness of gender-role stereotyping. This stereotyping in Lairds name alone implies that by virtue of his gender is to become a master and suggests that gender plays an important role in the initiation into adulthood. Growing up the narrator loves to help her father with the foxes instead of helping her mother with “the dreary and depressing” kitchen work. She considers the typecast assigned tasks her mother performs to be endless as opposed to her fathers which in her eyes are “important”. The conflict in her views of the “tedious” work done by her mom and the “real” work done by her father portrays a struggle between what the narrator is expected to do and what she wants to do. This eventually leads the narrator to unrealistically believe that the older she got, the more useful she will be to society and her father. As she grows older, she becomes more aware of the societal differences between boys and girls. She first experiences this when a salesman stops by one day she was working with her father and she is introduced as the “new hired help.” In turn the salesman remarks, “I thought it was only a girl.” This does nothing more than to increase her desire to do a mans job. This persistence only disturbs her mother, who is determined to prepare her for stereotypes later on in life. After talking with her mother, the narrator comes to realize there is no escaping the pre-determined duties that go along with