A new woman's journey into insanity: descent and return in the yellow wallpaper

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, women, as agents of moral influence, were expected to maintain the domestic sphere as a cheerful, pure haven for their husbands to return to each evening. Both the North and the South, different as they were, agreed on one issue—the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. The new emerging middle-class women of the rising entrepreneurs of the North together with the Southern lady supported firmly the cult of true womanhood with its four attributes “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (152).1 Put together they “spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman” (Welter 152).