Imageries in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Bliss”

Abstract

Norms for women have always been more inflexible, unyielding, and more clearly defined than for men. Such an approach towards the ‘weaker sex’ rigidly demarcates attitude, and behaviour, while simultaneously conditioning interpretation in a culture. In this ethos, anything that deviates from the custom is marked out as ‘unnatural’. Women writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Katherine Mansfield examine such ‘unnatural’ subjects and choose to review and render the inner self of these unaccomodated women through vivid imageries which establish a direct connection between the internal world of these women and their outside repressive and despotic reality. This paper looks into the imageries employed by Gilman and Mansfield in their respective short stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Bliss” to illustrate the predicament of the women in these stories. It is only through these imageries that a lucid picture of the consciousness of these women is painted on the outside world which mostly is obstinate to the yearnings of these women.