engleski

Gender Roles in Charlotte Perkins Gilman «The Yellow Wallpaper» and Doris Lessing's «To Room 19»

Gender role and its counterpart gender identity have been widely discussed in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, political science, literature, etc. Gender studies emerged as an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to gender identity and gender representation that embraced all these approaches often seen through the lenses of feminist theory. This paper sets out to explore gender roles in two short stories written in different historical periods: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's «The Yellow Wallpaper» (1892) and Doris Lessing's «To Room Nineteen» (1966). It attempts to illustrate how gender roles as «socially and culturally defined prescriptions and beliefs about the behaviour and emotions of men and women» (Anselmi & Law 1998: 195) are reflected on the thematic level of these short stories. It seeks to answer the question whether an underlying universal gender experience could be delineated in both stories in order to reveal a unified trait of women's socially and culturally conditioned experience. The paper is focused on figural elements in these stories, which forge metaphorical projections of various aspects of gender experience, in particular the metaphor of a cage, walls and wallpapers, as well as the motifs of word and picture as forbidden domains. It draws on some basic concepts of feminist criticism and gender roles theory. The analysis is focused on binary oppositions, in particular on the dynamics between the domestic (passive) and active roles, the concept of marriage and childcare, the role of stereotyping, and the phenomenon of creativity. The paper also seeks to prove that Virginia Woolf's terms locked in and locked out are still live issues and could be used as vital denominators in the discussion of gender roles in these short stories. Woolf used these terms in her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own to describe women's position in a patriarchal society.

gender role; feminist criticism; binary oppositions; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Doris Lessing

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