As clear as day, Henry James’ “Daisy
Miller: A Case Study” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
challenge both the social standards of “normality” between “madness” and of “manners”
between “improperness.” If these standards are biased, people who don’t follow
the mainstream standards may feel individually oppressed. Furthermore, they
will be treated as the outcasts lingering on the border. Particularly for women
at that time, they are comparatively more involved in this issue since women
are more easily to be restrained from being who they are and what they want to
do. Despite the female protagonists may be careless of and free from the social
judgments, they still can’t get away of it and are doomed to be so stuck in the
system for people around them, those who they take to hearts will really have a
great impact on changing their life because they are deeply influenced by the
society. Eventually leading to irredeemable tragedies, both cases critically condemns
the falseness of the social systems, which lacks of understanding, empathy and
love.
Evidently, both “Daisy Miller: A Case Study”
and “The Yellow Wallpaper” show us the problems in the society. In “Daisy
Miller: A Case Study,” James depicts the European society that is much restrained
especially for unmarried young ladies. When Daisy and Winterbourne first meet
each other, it actually takes them a while to finally accost with each other
much because of the social rule that in Geneva, “a young man wasn’t at liberty
to speak to a young unmarried lady save under certain rarely-occurring
conditions.” After Daisy and Winterbourne have a talk, Winterbourne even claims
that it was his first time hearing a young lady talk so much. Besides, Daisy
has been warned several times to watch her behavior or else she will “…be talked
about.” From these examples, we see that the European society is really
repressed and conservative about men and women relationships, especially in
public. And people like Winterbourne’s aunt, Mrs. Costello will surely be in
contempt of unconventional ones who are against these social rules.
Although setting in a colonial mansion, “The
Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates the problems of the whole health care system. To
help recover her illness, the female protagonist is settled by her physician
husband in the mansion. When she first enters the house, she immediately senses
that within the house “…there is something queer about it.” As a matter of
fact, she doesn’t want to go to such a place to receive retreatment at all that
she believes that “the congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me
good.” Nevertheless, then through her observation, it was ever a nursery house
and she is glad for she substitutes the children to stay in this weird house. During
days staying in the house, the female protagonist doesn’t actually get better
since now she rather feels confined in a house as a patient. The health care
system often gathers the mad and the ill, putting them alone or together,
separated from the normal society, but it often only exacerbates the patient’
condition.
Representing the mainstream social values in
contrast with the women protagonists, the male characters in “Daisy Miller: A
Case Study” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” play crucial roles in determining the
female protagonists’ life. Although as an American as Daisy, Winterbourne is
much aware of the social rules and confined to them. However, her English
courtesy enables him only to appreciate a lady instead of love. Winterbourne’s
way of looking at girls shown both in the beginning and the end is as if they were
only objects, like the descriptions,“…in the mind of a young American, who,
two, or three years ago, sat in the garden of the Trois Couronnes, looking
about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned.” and “an
imitation that he is much interested in a every clever foreign lady.” In
addition, Winterbourne’s struggling categorization of Daisy that whether she is
a girl of innocence and purity or an “American Flirt” also shows us his further
categorization on women. The struggle ends when he sees Daisy out alone with
the Italian and determines that Daisy is “a young lady whom a gentle man need
no longer be at pains to respect.” After Daisy’s death, Winterbourne, though
realizing that his esteem is what really matters to Daisy, “…She would have
appreciated one’s esteem,” he doesn’t really gain any knowledge about himself
but justifies for himself by putting the blame on that he has been too long
away from the country. Judging from this, the English sophistication seems to corrupt
and becomes a false one that they already lose the heart to see the thing
itself.
Like
Winterbourne representing the European values, “Daisy Miller: A Case Study” “The
Yellow Wallpaper,” the male protagonist John also embraces the modern values of
authority and science. In the beginning, we are introduced to John as “…practical
in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of
superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and
seen and put down in figures.” As a loving husband and a professional
physician, he tries his best to cure his wife by putting her outside of the
community and repressing her from writing and fantasying. As a matter of fact,
it is the husband’s good-intentioned but self-assertive dictatorship results in
both her wife’s alienation and illness. These factors make the female
protagonist feels there’s a need to save herself from the confined house by peeling
away the wallpaper and crawling to set her fancies symbolically free. Eventually,
she says in triumph, “I’ve got out at last.” As we can see, alienation is
actually what makes her mad at last.
In Henry James’ “Daisy Miller: A Case Study”
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the two female
protagonists in both cases can be generally regarded as the social and psychological
unfits. However, it is actually the social standard that excludes them and fails
to use the proper way to treat them as a human being. By observing these two
texts, we clearly see the falseness of modern civilization which neglects
humanity and lacks of true understanding, empathy and love for people.
Works Cited
Reidhead, Julia,
et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter
7th ed. New York: Norton, 2008.
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