The Confinement of Gender Appropriate Roles Essay Example

to form a severe mental illness called puerperal insanity triggered by the mental and physical strain of giving birth. The recommended treatment of puerperal insanity was quieting the nervous system and restoring strength through rest. With this unfortunate and unintentional ignorance of mental illness, John believes he is treating his wife well when he confines her to a bedroom for rest with no socializing, writing, or entertainment. His gender role during this time period meant he should take control and make all of the decisions. Women were considered overemotional, weak and therefore not capable of decision making (CITE). When the narrator tries to tell her husband she wants to write, socialize and remove herself from the “revolting… [and] dull” (Gilman 115) room of torn up yellow wallpaper, he does not listen. She knows something feels wrong, but feels helpless when she states “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman 115). She feels she is failing in her role as she is not able to manage the household and raise her baby. She makes this clear when she says “it does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!”(Gilman 115). Her uneducated mind does not understand how her restricted gender role is a source of her struggles.

Women are not the only sex feeling confined in their gender role. In the short story “The Boat” written by Alistair MacLeod, it is the male gender in the story that feels pressure to stay in their role of traditionally working. The first person narrator, a university teacher reflecting on his

childhood, talks about his family’s tradition of working on a fishing boat. In this tradition, the men fish while the women tend to the house and children. Throughout the story, the mother and father struggle to understand each other’s perspectives on how to raise their children. This contrast also shows in the dissimilarity of the father’s bedroom compared to the rest of the house taken care of by the mother. The mother’s kitchen is immaculate while the father’s bedroom is unorganized, full of books, tobacco, and battered furniture. As the story unfolds, the reader learns the father once had a dream to attend University to pursue literature, but instead feels pressure to keep with family tradition and continues fishing. The mother despises reading, saying “…God will see to those who waste their lives reading useless books when they should be about their work” (MacLeod 228) and is upset when her daughters leave to marry non-fishermen. The daughters do not carry on their mother’s traditions of taking care of the fishermen’s needs of mending, cooking and cleaning. The mother becomes upset and cannot adapt to the evolving gender role perceptions nor accepts her children’s desires to be non-traditional. The father, however, does accept these ideas and encourages his son to attend school. The father has been sacrificing his life to be a fisherman, something he does not seem to enjoy. Perhaps aware that he felt tied to this traditional male role, the father tries to convince his son to follow his dreams with school. When the father dies, the son is finally released his from his responsibilities of the boat. The reader might assume the father

died by jumping (rather than falling) in the water, sacrificing himself for his son’s happiness. The father’s death is very symbolic of the confinement of his gender role. “Wedged between two boulders” (MacLeod 235) symbolizes being trapped between his duties and desires. Another symbol is “…the brass chains on his wrists…”(MacLeod 235) which represents being chained to the boat and the Sea (CITE USER GUIDE). There seems to be a drastic line between living happily in a traditional gender role and becoming hopelessly confined to it.

Traditional roles still happen today, but the flexibility in these roles is accepted more often. The confinement in gender roles as told in both stories ended poorly for both struggling characters. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman was so restrained by the wrongful treatment of her post-partum depression that she inevitably descended into the depth of extreme mental illness. Her sanity deteriorated instead of progressing how her husband had hoped. If she (and those around her) were able to understand her disorder, and describe both her feelings and her needs better, perhaps she would have recovered. The same scenario appears in “The Boat”; if the father didn’t feel bound to his gender role, perhaps he would be alive and happily attending a University. We can learn from history, including these stories, that sexism is not acceptable and can be very damaging. Equality, antidiscrimination and interpretations of roles still have a long way to go, but if we can continue to learn, accept, and understand each other, social norms can reflect change.