The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, talks about a woman who is newly married and is a mother who is in depression. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure. Though she longs to write, her husband - doctor forbid it. The narrator feels trapped by both her husband and surroundings. The woman she sees behind the wallpaper is a symbol of herself and the Victorian women like her.

The surroundings which one is placed in can drastically contribute to their mental state. Deterioration and a lack of stimulation will be reciprocated within the mind of the inhabitant. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, depicts a young, unnamed woman who is suffering with post-partum depression. In this time period, the treatment of mental illness typically did more harm than good as electroshock therapy, and the rest cure were the classic treatments of choice. Similarly, William Faulkner, the author of “A Rose for Emily”, written in 1930, gives the reader an inside look upon an elderly woman experiencing mental distress. Although there are major signs of an issue being present within Miss Emily’s old, southern house, the town chooses to ignore and cover them up as to not disrupt the elderly woman who buys poisons without a reason and sleeps next to the dead corpse of her lover. Theme and setting play two very distinct and important roles within each of these stories allowing the reader to have a more complete understanding of the message the author is trying to convey.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860, in the city of Hartford, CT. She would later move to California. She would end her own life in 1935, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought for women’s rights and was an advocate of socialism. She wrote novels, poetry and short stories. She was a woman who was educated; her writing reflected her knowledge, relating to her strong thoughts on woman’s rights and independence and how women of Victorian times suffered from this lack of rights. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys her views on feminism and how women are treated through characters who represent this treatment. The characters she uses help the reader really get drawn into her story;

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a woman driven insane by postpartum depression and a dangerous treatment. Nevertheless, when you study the protagonist, it shows that the story is more about finding the protagonist’s identity. The protagonist’s proposes of an imaginary woman, which at first, is just her shadow against the bars of the wallpaper. The pattern shows her identity, expressing the conflict that she experiences and eventually leads her to a complete breakdown of what is her identity and that of the imaginary shadow.

Many people know what it feels like to be “trapped” in the emotional sense of things, but how many can say they have been both physically and emotionally trapped. Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her personal bout with depression to create a powerful fictional narrative, which has broad implications for women. When the narrator recognizes that there is more than one trapped, creeping woman, Gilman indicates that the meaning of her story extends beyond an isolated, individual situation. Gilman’s main purpose in writing The Yellow Wallpaper is to doom not only a specific medical treatment but also the misogynistic principles and resulting sexual politics that make such a treatment possible. Those things lead to the major themes of the story: freedom, confinement, and madness.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is widely recognized for her support of feminism and calls for awareness to her mental condition by voicing her ideas through her original writing. One of her works, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, describes a woman who suffers from severe anxiety and is isolated in a room in order to “heal” according to her husband. While in the room, she becomes obsessed with the ugly wallpaper, which leads to her fall. In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author discusses the Narrator’s deteriorating mental state, her inability to differentiate reality and imagination, and her desire to rebel against

An anonymous author once said, “What consumes your mind, controls your life.” In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is suffering from severe depression, at the very least and constantly tries to get better. While trying to get better she becomes increasingly fixated on the yellow wallpaper that encompasses her in her room. It gets to the point where the wallpaper is all she thinks about and slowly, it starts to control her life. The yellow wallpaper in this story is a representation of the narrator’s relationship with her disease.

Written in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the experience of a nervous woman named Jane who falls into psychosis during the “rest cure” treatment prescribed by her husband John. The rest cure admits the patient to bed rest with limited activity for the body and mind allowed; Dr. S. Weir Mitchell advocated the rest cure and is mentioned by name in the short story by Gilman who had him as her doctor (Gilman 80). During Jane’s rest cure, she is banned from creative work like writing her thoughts but finds “great relief from writing on dead paper”, even if it includes hiding her banned writings from being discovered. The one main complaint Jane has in her writings is the yellow wallpaper that surrounds the room without pattern or end and slowly grows more bothersome to Jane during her rest cure. Jane describes how the colors remind her of disgusting yellow things, how even the wallpaper smells up the rental house, and shakes by a woman within the wallpaper (Gilman 85-86). With nothing to occupy Jane’s mind the wallpaper becomes an obsession that torments her anxiety and consumes her sanity towards the end of her rest cure. Gilman experiences the same madness from her rest cure treatment as Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The horrid treatment of “rest cure” from doctor Silas Weir Mitchell led author Charlotte Perkins Gilman into writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” sharing her experience of madness resulting from her treatment to represent the

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 role of women in the 19th century was reflected in The Yellow Wallpaper. In the 19th century, husbands and fathers did not allow females to interact with certain activities. Women duties were based upon their children and their household(Stansell). In The Yellow Wallpaper, John wants the narrator to cater to himself and their child. Although John tries to govern the narrator, his society is the based on the same nature.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman creates a narrator who rents out a mansion in the summer with her husband. The main reason for their summer retreat is because the narrator is “ill” and suffering from what her husband calls “a slight hysterical tendency.” The narrator’s husband places her in a big airy sunlit room with hideous yellow wallpaper asserting she be confined to bed rest. As time goes by, the woman becomes infatuated with the yellow wallpaper claiming that there’s a woman enclosed in the pattern. I’m arguing that the wallpaper plays a role in symbolism. In my opinion, it represents how the narrator suffers from the oppression of her husband and the feeling of being trapped.

Because of the narrator’s madness, she was unable to make the connection between the woman behind the wallpaper and herself. The narrator felt trapped, like the woman in the wallpaper, due to her domineering husband, her lack of individuality and personal freedom of choice, as well as the prejudices suppressing her from society at large.

Isolation has been simultaneously described as the human race’s largest desire and deepest fear. The idea of isolation is tempting to a person who feels overwhelmed and overly surrounded by human interaction, but it is much less tempting and much more terrifying to one who has truly experienced isolation. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one person who falls into the latter category. She wrote, “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a social commentary and personal narrative on the widely accepted treatment of rest cure, which she had undergone herself. She spoke out against the treatment vigorously, as her first hand experiences had given her the perspective that the cure was extremely detrimental instead of helpful. She shed light on the fact that the treatment inherently causes more negative effects then positive because it goes directly against human nature by completely isolating a human being. Although the story was somewhat fictional, it was inspired by her actual experience with the treatment that was administered to her by her husband, Charles Stetson. Stetson was concerned about her, so he went to S. Weir Mitchell, the created of the rest cure. S. Weird Mitchell set up a specific treatment catered towards Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and even let her be treated in her house, which is traditionally not allowed in rest cure. Charlotte Perkins Gilman fought against the rest cure because the treatment promotes extreme isolation which is proven to have serious negative effects on physical,

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was written in the late nineteenth century. In the time of the late nineteenth century, hysteria, “which is a psychological disorder when the persons symptoms covert from psychological stress into physical symptoms, selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.” (Hysteria biography) Has also been defined as, “a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear or emotional excess” (Hysteria biography). Hysteria has been previously thought to be the condition that the narrator has in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, during the time it was written, because it was such a common diagnosis for symptoms such as these around that time. Personally, I think that the condition she is actually suffering from is postpartum depression, due to the extended amount of symptoms that she shows throughout the entire story. Which postpartum depression differs from hysteria because it’s “a complex mix of physical, emotional and behavioral changes that occur in a mother after giving birth.” (WebMD) “Most mothers who experience postpartum love their children but feel that they won’t be good at mothering.” (healthyminds) In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator says, “It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” (Gilman 105). In this we see how the narrator doubts

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is on the surface a mysterious story about a woman suffering from depression to mad, but actually, it reveals the oppression of women from their patriarchal families. In the late 19th century, women couldn’t enjoy the freedom they do today, and most of them suffered from hysteria. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a typical example of those women who live with low social status. In my opinion, the reason resulting in her lower social situation is the narrator’s retreat from the reality, and the narrator must break the tradition of patriarchy if she wants more rights and free. In this story, the narrator’s