Movie stars! Glamorous, always funny, they are the people to be or the people to date. Girls swoon over their favorite movie hunk. Real life is too bland; women are always looking for a their own James Bond to enrapture them. For teenagers, it's all about Orlando Bloom's immortal elfish ears or Ashton Kutcher's Midwestern innocence, for more mature women, they are bewitched by Tom Cruise's boyish smile, the brooding Johnny Depp, or the handsome but strong-minded Bono (I didn't forget Bono). Sometimes, however, these simple fantasies become infatuations. Posters and calendars hang from every crevice of one's bedroom. However, these symbols are not as good as the real thing. Perhaps, one imagines a romantic world with this movie star. These infatuations become reality; they talk and interact with their prince charming. Creepy? But to never posses this dream would make life meaningless, their only escape is to the world of the insane. Is it better to live in the world of hopelessness or in one's constructed world? For women in the 19th century of gender expectations, this was a reality. Women could either live in an oppressive world, where a woman's value was found in her uterus and her submissiveness, or opt to insanity. In Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator's only triumph from an oppressive society is to become insane.
John begins the process of transforming his wife into a submissive woman by physically imprisoning her. By keeping her in a room, he will always know where she is. Like an infant, she does not have the ability to leave as she chooses. "And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head" (3). It sounds as if a father is reading a bedtime story to his daughter, not a normal relationship between a man and a woman. John, like 19th century society, wants his wife as submissive as a child, always trusting father's advice.