The Women Behind The Yellow Wallpaper

In the 19th century, the female gender faced limited opportunity and the widespread belief of inferiority to the male gender. Women were viewed as being frail, weak, and in constant need of a man to help her do even the most basic tasks. This resulted in devastating effects on the female psyche, including debasement of character and even catastrophic mental illness. Literature written by the women of the aforementioned time period conveys the isolation, humiliation, and agony experienced by the females of that time. The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, serves as an excellent example of such a piece of literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates subordinate standing of the female role in the 19th century and how such social conditions can have a devastating effects impact on the human mind. (Wilson)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression, undergoing the sexist psychological treatments of mental health, that took place during the late nineteenth century. The narrator in Gilman’s story writes about being forced to do nothing, and how that she feels that is the worst possible treatment for her. In this particular scene, the narrator writes that she thinks normal work would do her some good, and that writing allows her to vent, and get across her ideas that no one seems to listen to. Gilman’s use of the rhetorical appeal pathos, first-person point of view, and forceful tone convey her message that confinement is not a good cure for mental health, and that writing,

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which she describes the treatment of a woman diagnosed with a nervous disorder by her doctor and is prescribed the “rest cure.” The story describes the submissive, childlike obedience of women to men that was considered typical at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the story, there are many symbols that highlight women’s infantilization within marriage and a sexist society. The symbolism of the wallpaper and the woman trapped within it are essential for the message of Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a great example of early works pertaining to feminism and the disease of insanity. Charlotte Gilman’s own struggles as a woman, mother, and wife shine through in this short story capturing the haunting realism of a mental breakdown.The main character, much like Gilman herself, slips into bouts of depression after the birth of her child and is prescribed a ‘rest cure’ to relieve the young woman of her suffering. Any use of the mind or source of stimulus is strictly prohibited, including the narrator’s favorite hobby of writing. The woman’s husband, a physician, installs into his wife that the rest treatment is correct and will only due harm if not followed through. This type of treatment ultimately drives the woman insane, causing her to envision a woman crawling behind the yellow wallpaper of her room. Powerlessness and repression the main character is subject to creates an even more poignant message through the narrator’s mental breakdown. The ever present theme of subordination of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is advanced throughout the story by the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

In her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman expresses exasperation towards the separate male and female roles expected of her society, and the evident repressed rights of a woman versus the active duties of a man. The story depicts the methods taken to cure a woman of her psychological state during Gilman’s time, and delineates the dominant cure of the time period, “the resting cure,” which encouraged the restraint of the imagination ("The Yellow Wallpaper: Looking Beyond the Boundaries") Gilman uses the unnamed narrator to represent the average repressed woman of her time and how her needs were neglected in an attempt to mark a fixed distinction between the standards and expectations of men and women. John, the narrator’s husband, take the designated and patriarchal role of a man who believes he knows everything there is to know about the human mind. His belief of his superior knowledge pushes him to condescend, overshadow, and misunderstand his wife. As a result, his wife loses control of her life and escapes into her own fantasy world, where she is able dominate her imagination, free her mind, and fall into insanity. Gilman describes her era’s approach toward female psychology in order to criticize the patriarchal society she lived in as well as to reveal its effects on the women of her time.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she discusses some of the issues found in 19th century society such as women’s oppression and the treatment of mental illness. Many authors throughout history have written stories that mimic their own lives and we see this in the story. We see Gilman in the story portrayed as Jane, a mentally unstable housewife who cannot escape her husband’s oppression or her own mind. Gilman reveals a life of depression and women’s oppression through her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a short story, published in the late 1800s, about one woman’s descent to madness. Finding herself plagued with postpartum depression after the birth of her son, the narrator’s ailment is overlooked by everyone around her. Her husband, “...a physician of high standing..” (Gilman) describes the narrator’s illness as “temporary nervous depression...a slight hysterical tendency.” Her brother and male doctor, also agree with this diagnosis and because so, the narrator is forced to go through a rather peculiar treatment plan that was commonly practiced on women who were considered hysterical during that time period. Considered a societal norm this treatment plan, created by the dominate male,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of a woman who goes mad while fixating on a bizarre wall-covering has been used as an early example of post-partum depression. In the latter part of the 1800’s women were seen as inferior subordinates to men who could not be trusted due to the effect of the female organs on their brains. The narrator is almost certainly a victim of the lack of medical knowledge of the day, while the prevailing attitudes in the medical field of women as childlike and the social pressure of male domination contribute to the narrator’s illness. The husband’s role as spouse and physician enable his benevolent manipulation of the narrator by isolating her and removing her

In a classic piece of feminist writing, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the mental deterioration of a woman diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed the rest cure, an infamously ineffective treatment for anxiety and depression pioneered by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell at the turn of the nineteenth century. The story is framed as the narrator’s journal entries, which are infrequent and rushed because writing them violates the rest cure, thus making her writings a better representative of her descent into madness as well as her potent emotions regarding her confinement than had she written one for every day of her three month stay in the room with the repellant and titular yellow wallpaper. Gilman expresses the narrator’s societally mandated respect for her husband in addition to her resentment of the inferior treatment of women through her formal and impassioned tone and virulent imagery in reference to the setting in her 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The structure of the text, particularly evident in the author’s interactions with her husband, reveals the binary opposition between the façade of a middle-class woman living under the societal parameters of the Cult of Domesticity and the underlying suffering and dehumanization intrinsic to marriage and womanhood during the nineteenth century. While readers recognize the story for its troubling description of the way in which the yellow wallpaper morphs into a representation of the narrator’s insanity, the most interesting and telling component of the story lies apart from the wallpaper. “The Yellow Wallpaper” outwardly tells the story of a woman struggling with post-partum depression, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman snakes expressions of the true inequality faced within the daily lives of nineteenth century women throughout the story. Although the climax certainly surrounds the narrator’s overpowering obsession with the yellow wallpaper that covers the room to which her husband banished her for the summer, the moments that do not specifically concern the wallpaper or the narrator’s mania divulge a deeper and more powerful understanding of the torturous meaning of womanhood.

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a complex story of a woman falling victim to her social ascription in the Victorian Period. This narrative was written in 1982, a time when the Woman’s Rights movement had just started its long hard fight for equality. Gilman continues this movement by showing the abuse of Patriarchal Authority men have over woman during this time. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about an unnamed woman who is diagnosed with nervous depression by her husband, John. John rents a large summer home and puts his wife into a room that reminds her of a nursery.

Sometimes when one concerns too much about the views of others on heroneself, it is difficult to remain true to her oneself. Such as the woman in the text “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she attempts to pay no attention to her mental illness in order to cater for the opinions of others. Therefore, the woman trust her husband and always listen to him, so she does not consider her own opinion, “[The narrator]so I takes phosphates or phosphites- whichever it is...” she continues taking the drug even though she does not know the name of the drug and what is it for, she is lack of her own decisions. However, compares to the poem “The Type” by Sarah Kay, she states a woman should act by her own ideas, and not to live in the

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow-Wall Paper” is, on the surface, a story about a woman driven mad due to a combination of post-partum depression and the potentially devastating effects of the treatment methods employed at the time. However, the story is also, in a deeper sense, about the fundamental identity of women in the 19th century. Gilman gives voice to this issue by painting a picture of the life of Jane, the protagonist in the story. She gives us an intimate look into the character’s psyche as she skids down the slope towards madness due to her virtual imprisonment and blatant disregard for her thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Not only does she give us a sense of a woman’s identity and place in this time but we also get a unique insight into the character’s own feeling of self-identity through the imaginary woman - who the protagonists discovers trapped in the wall paper of the room she herself is trapped in.

Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is centered on the deteriorating psychological condition of the female narrator. As a woman in a male dominating society in the 19th century, the narrator has no control over her life. This persistence eventually evolves into her madness. The insanity is triggered by her change in attitude towards her husband, the emergent obsession with the wallpaper and the projection of herself as the women behind the wallpaper. The “rest cure” which was prescribed by her physician husband, created the ideal environment for her madness to extend because, it was in her imagination that she had some freedom and control.

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.