Egalitarianism is the belief in true human equality that transcends race, political status, economic status and social role. I believe that those who strongly believe in the concept of Egalitarianism have had to experience some form of oppression in their lives. For example Martin Luther King Jr.,civil rights leader, was a believer in egalitarianism and freedom among all people. He expressed his feelings on the acquirement of freedom when he said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” What I get from his quote is that the rights and freedom of the oppressed, whoever they may be in the situation, are irrelevant to the oppressor for they are not oppressed themselves. The only option to gain freedom for the oppressed is to take charge and escape or defy their oppressor and demand their freedom. This can be seen in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the case of her husband and doctor prescribing her bed rest and inactivity for her “Hysteria”
In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” when the protagonist is isolated in her room and walled off from everything she begins despising the wallpaper of the room and begins to believe that she sees a women behind bars in the wall. The women she sees represents her behind the restrictions of her husband and the doctor, and all other inequalities that women had to face during that time period. At this time in the U.S. women were treated as second class citizens and their rights were constantly trampled on. You can see this when Gilman describes her situation, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is”(Gilman 1) referring to their word overruling hers. As she stays in the room longer she becomes delusional and begins to tear at the wall. This is representative of her tearing down the wall of oppression that she’s had to deal with. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all.” (Gilman 317). The crawling behind the wall are these defiant acts and these constant defiant acts, like those taken during the women's suffrage movement, shook the view of women at the time. The one women who crawled all around during this story was Charlotte Gilman by writing and reading against her husband's wishes she defies him, but the isolation and oppression take a toll on her mental health when she starts ripping down the wallpaper aggressively. Limiting her creativity by banning her from any creative outlet, led to her having to “crawl” behind her husband and write. Her husband though does not understand that he's harming his wife in the end.. He doesn’t feel as if he’s oppressing her because all the actions he took were the average course of action for any man to take with his wife. He’s a white male in the late 1800’s he faced significant less discrimination and oppression than any women and minority at the time, he believes he’s doing the best for his wife in this situation. Gilman says it herself when describing John, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction….he takes all care from me, and so i feel basely ungrateful to not value it more.” (309) This form of oppression is reminiscent of the movie Snowpiercer by Joon Ho Bong.
In the movie Snowpiercer, humanity is destroyed but there exist survivors who are on a train that is in constant motion around the world. In this train a class system begins to form where the elites begin to push everyone else to the tail of the train and occupy all other carts. It is a story about class warfare as the tail of the train revolts violently to make there way towards the front of the train to restore equality. One point brought up in this movie was the idea that revolutions were necessary, the main character finds out at the end of the movie that the revolution that he just threw has happened at least five times already. There exist a political ‘tactic’ in the film in which a controlled revolution were to happen with each new generation of train inhabitants in order to cull the population size down. The oppression that the tail of the train faced was heavily similar to that of people in a prison, and they were forced to silence. Like Gilman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” they had no say in their lives, they had no choice in food, no freedom to leave the cart, and the elites would choose to take a child from the tail every couple of months with no regards. The revolution was inevitable for equality to be reached on the train, but the elite who ran this government, Wilford, saw nothing wrong with how he treated the train inhabitants. He believed it worked as an ecosystem and each revolution would be a reset. Wilford believed that the oppression the back was forced to face wouldn't matter because the revolution would occur and the poor will become the elites and eventually repeat the process. He believed that this was the only way to ensure the survival of the human race. Both him and John in “The Yellow Wallpaper” believe that the oppression that they subjugate the train inhabitants and John's wife to were justified . In the case of Wilford believing that his ends justifying the means and John unknowingly destroying his wife's mental health through his treatment of her.
Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1892. The Norton
Introduction to Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. 328. Print.
Carter, Joe. "How to Understand Snowpiercer." Acton Institute PowerBlog. N.p., 18 July 2014. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
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