Season 3, Episode 7: Victorian Marriage and the Yellow Wallpaper

Jeanne and Jennifer talk about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” discussing how biblical texts helped create the idea of marriage as constructed and idealized in Victorian culture. In Victorian marriage, care becomes a form of control as a male patriarch directs the life of a woman who is considered his inferior in intellect and judgment. The story portrays a woman whose intellectual life becomes constarined and stunted by Dr. Silas Weir’s “rest cure,” a so-called “treatment” for
”hysteria” (mental distress in a woman) in Victorian England and the United States.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Phyliss Chesler. Women and Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Xenophon. Oeconomicas.