There is one word that
billions of people around this spherical globe called ‘Earth’ can correlate
with the thought of the United States of America (U.S.): Freedom. ‘Freedom and
America’ was like ‘peanut butter and jelly’; you nearly can’t have one without
the other and when one thought of living in the U.S., one also thought of
freedom. Despite the stereotypical ideology of America, the two words seem to
have become incongruous of one another and bring many misconceptions on the
rigid conformist society U.S. citizen’s fight daily to eradicate or improve. In
American and all over the world, people are fighting for equalities among
humans such as gender equality or racial equality and although there are
subgroups, they can all be grouped under one term: egalitarianism.
Although during the civil rights
movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas of equality appealed to all the
movements occurring at that time, not just to people of color. Some of the most
powerful words King once said was, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the
oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” King explains that for a
group that is oppressed by another group, humans, unfortunately, do not contain
the moral capacity to release the suffocating hold of control of the latter
group. Due to the controlling innate nature of humans, in order to get one’s
freedom and break the confines of the straightjacket of oppression, one must
fight for it and get their point across clearly and boldly with a stupendous
amount of gumption. Without it, without ambition and determination, the oppressing
group will always be relentless to keep the chokehold of power, if not increase
and expand it even further. No one is sure of when these groups formed and when
or why they decided they were “better” than others; there was not a person
verifiable enough to make these judgments, it seems as if it were pulled from
thin air. Regardless of the invalid assumptions of superiority, those who are
being oppressed by the majority groups must demand their equality and fight “’till
the finish” for it; otherwise they will have a tough time getting freedom by
simply saying “please”.
In the short story The
Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte
Perkins-Gillman, Gillman clearly delineates how women are oppressed and
neglected in a patriarchal society. In the story, the narrator is diagnosed
with “hysteria” (modern-day Postpartum Depression) and is forced to live
confined in a small room with one small window and no outside communication for
several months. The only person the narrator is allowed to be in contact with
is John, her husband, and her care takers. As the story progresses, it is
evident that although wanting the best for her, John continuously neglects the
narrator’s feelings and assumes control over her. He completely neglects all of
her wishes whilst telling her that he knows better and claims he does actually
see her getting “better”. John’s oppression of the narrator is clearly portrayed
when she says, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are
serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are
dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows
there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” (Gillman, 42-45) John is
often not physically there and when he is, he is not emotionally “there”,
either. He feels that she has no reason to suffer and that she can easily be
“fixed”. She isn’t allowed to write,
draw, color, or even think; she is supposed to just lay there like a vegetable
and any thoughts in, forcing her to write in secret. He denies her when she
tries to speak with him and confides in him, asking her to stop talking about
her unnatural thoughts and to trust his word. As the story progresses further,
she starts to develop an irrational fixation on the yellow wallpaper on the
walls of the room, finding odd shapes and patterns and marks; leading up to
multiple hallucinations and “seeing” a woman behind the wallpaper who comes out
and “creeps” at night. As the narrators mental stability breaks down due to her
inability to express her mind and communicate with the outside world, John
finally finds her having a mental breakdown at the end of the story as she
claims to be “creeping” around the room and tearing off the wallpaper
exclaiming that she cannot be put back; she came to the conclusion that the
woman she had “seen” trapped behind the wallpaper was herself. Furthermore, the
narrator felt trapped and imprisoned in her body and in that room to the point
where she tore apart the wallpaper so she could not be put back “behind the
bars” of imprisonment. The importance of the main point Gillman was trying to
convey is was that the rest cure solely drove women to insanity; the rest cure
was merely a hoax created by the famous misogynist and male chauvinist, Weir
Mitchell.
The aforementioned form of
oppression is also portrayed in the movie Changeling,
based on a true story, written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Clint
Eastwood. Set in 1928, the main character, Christine Collins, is distraught as
she finds her son, Walter, being bullied at school because her husband had left
her and her son, leaving her to raise him on her own. There were clear troubles
between the mother and son as one can see her son become very lonely and hurt
that his mother is always working and doesn’t spend time with him. One day,
Christine and Walter had planned to see a movie when Christine suddenly got
called into work to cover for a sick coworker and unfortunately had to cancel,
once again, her plans with her son. When she left for work, although she did
try to ensure his safety and told him to stay inside, Walter decided to go for
a walk alone. When Christine arrived home from work she looked all around for
Walter but could not seem to find him, nor had any neighbors seen him. She
walked all over town until night time looking for Walter and tried to call the
police but they denied her because her son had not been missing for more than
24-hours and to wait for him to come home. As days pass and Walter still does not
come home, she finally filed a police report and makes multiple press announcements
for anyone who finds him to bring him home and that she is looking for him. She
soon got a call from the police department telling her they found her son and
as her and her son are reunited in front of paparazzi, she got a strange
feeling that the boy was not her son. She started taking measurements of his
height, asked him questions, and noticed biological factors that all indicated
that the boy was in fact not her son; which was also supported by physicians
and Walter’s school teacher. Christine decided to make an announcement that the
boy was not her son and that the police
made a mistake. Offended, Captain of the L.A. Police Department (LAPD), J.J.
Jones, claimed she was a liar and accused her of neglecting her own son and
sent her to a mental institution where she met other women accused of insanity
for claiming abuse by a male police officer. She was never to be released until
she admitted and signed documents stating that her accusations against the
police were false; she refused.
During a separate investigation, another detective captured a
boy who had been living in the country illegally. The boy eventually confessed
and told the detective he was forced to stay with a man named Gordon Northcott
on his farm and help him abduct and kill children, or else he’d be killed, too.
The boy brought the detective to where the children were buried and the police
captured the man and arrested him. While the boy was identifying pictures of
missing boys, he came across Walter’s picture and knew for a fact that he was
one of the boys they abducted, but not killed. Later in the movie, one learns
that while Walter was walking around his neighborhood, he had been picked up by
the strange man (Northcott) and the boy in a truck and was brought back to the
farm. When the police heard about the boy’s story, Christine was released and
she made multiple public announcements, resulting in the release of fellow
patients who had been wrongly imprisoned in the ward. Northcott appeared in court
and Christine finally faced the man who had kidnapped her son and although Northcott
pleaded not guilty, he was found guilty and received the death penalty and was
to be hanged. Northcott repeatedly told Collins
that he did not kill her son and swore by it and toyed with her mind when she
tried to talk with him while he was in jail. At the end of the movie, a boy who
had escaped was reunited with his parents, telling them he knew Walter, and if
it weren’t for him, he wouldn’t have escaped and would have been killed; he didn’t
know what happened to Walter after they escaped. J.J. Jones was suspended from
the police department and although Walter had never been found and it was
unsure of what exactly happened to him, Christine never stopped looking.
Changeling
connects to the story The Yellow
Wallpaper because both, set in similar time periods, include women whose
voices were oppressed by patriarchal men who deemed themselves as “superior”.
Both Collins and the narrator in the short story had trouble having control
over their own lives as there were both sent to confinement for being seemingly
“insane” and to “heal”. Collins’ voice was repressed by the voice of male
police officers, mostly by Captain Jones, who disregarded those who supported
her in saying that the boy was a phony; she was then sent to a mental institution
getting refused release until she agreed that she had lied, essentially forcing
her to succumb to male authority. Similar to Collins, the narrator of the short
story was sent to the confinement of a small room forced to cut off all outside
communication with no means to express thoughts or emotions, being repressed by
her husband, John. She was suffering from what they called “hysteria” and
weren’t aware of the causes. Both women faced wrong imprisonment and forced
against their own will and neglected as if they were not people. In relation to
King’s quote previously stated, Collins had to fight for her voice to be heard
and fight for her son to be found; she refused to stop looking regardless the
amount of times the LAPD had told her to stop. They found embarrassment in
Collins’ accusations that the boy brought to her was not her son and felt insulted;
the only way to clear their own name was to shut up her up by throwing her in a
psychiatric ward with other women who “insulted” the LAPD. The oppressive males
in the movie did not simply alleviate the amount of control they assumed over
Collins’ life, she had to force them to stop assuming she had gone crazy and
eventually was released from the mental institution; she was given freedom. She
then had the freedom to continue looking for her son and to make numerous press
speeches. Gillman also demands the freedom of women from the terrors of the
rest cure. Without Gillman, the rest cure would have gone on for decades until
someone else realized it was ineffective. Her story spoke volumes to not only
women but men, too; making it evident that the rest cure does the exact
opposite of what it was designed to do. Both Straczynski and Gillman neatly
portrayed the discrimination and male domination women were forced to succumb
to and enlightened the world that women should not be oppressed or given a less
of a say than males, especially when it comes to the dictatorship of a woman’s
own life.
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