"But what is one to do?" Existentialism in Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper": A Philosophical Study

Abstract

From the beginning of history till now, people have been interested in the study of philosophy. Therefore, there is common acknowledgement of the difficulty in summarizing or presenting one sufficient definition to the term. Yet, in simple clarification, philosophy can be defined as the study of general and essential questions about everything in the world such as existence, religion, literature, and other fields in life. This paper will limit the discussion to the philosophical analysis of a literary work entitled as "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by C. P. Gilman in an existential framework.

Most previous studies on this story had tackled it from the feminist standpoint because it reflects the writer’s madness in rejecting the social oppression of women. This current paper fills the gap in the world of existential philosophy to show that although this story is a short one, it manages to shed light on the existential issues of individuals. To give clarity to this study, the views of a number of philosophers regarding existentialism are taken into consideration. One of them is Sartre who analyzed the story from the humanism perspective along with Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Existentialism is treated as a form of intersubjectivity according to the philosophy of Abbagnano and Merleau-Ponty. Existence is a Reason as asserted by Hegel but of which is rejected by the philosophy of Schelling. Finally, existentialism is connected to nihilism in the philosophy of Nietzsche. The study is later summed up with a conclusion that shows the findings of the research.