rst and then a playroom and gymnasium" suggests that the room transforms to suit all terms of imprisonment.The narrator's inability to escape the entrapment of society's view of women is reinforced in her husband's refusal to remove the wallpaper. "He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on" (258). Given that one of the interpretations of the wallpaper is that it represents the Greek view of hysteria, the removal of this wallpaper represents the removal of the medical bias against women. Yet the husband views the removal of the symbolic wallpaper as inconsequential, since he believes that once he removes it he will be asked to remove the heavy bedstead, barred windows, and the gate at the head of the stairs. John represents the male viewpoint that once certain rights and liberties are afforded to women, women will demand to be equal with men.Gilman attributed the lack of respect for women as one of the factors contributing to their depression. In her essay "The 'Nervous Breakdown' of Women" she stresses the importance of economic equality between the sexes:Even if we should remove every legal and political discrimination against women; even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex; so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic hand labor, and economically a nonproductive, dependent class&emdash;servants of the other sex. (71)Gilman addresses the problems of the newly industrialized economy. It is her view that this shift in the power of economics from the wife and husband team to just the husband makes the abandoned wives "the dependent class&emdash;servants of the other sex." Gilman also addresses the belief that women are physically weaker than men in "The 'Nervous Breakdown' of Women":…the faults and virtues, charms and fai...
