The Yellow Wallpaper Hysteria

Kessler emphasizes the point that this one short story seemed parallel and mirror the views of Gilman in regards to the oppression of women in her society. Comparing the two, Kessler writes, “This once she was able to join her public and private expressions in a work of devastating impact” (Kessler 1991 p.159). Gilman, who was a leader and crusader in the women’s rights movement, tried to expel away the gender bias that plague women, just as the narrator in her story tries to pull off the wallpaper in her room to free the trapped women behind it. The patriarchal society at that time period was Gilman’s wallpaper. She had to work hard at trying to force through societal changes. Just like the resistant old wallpaper in her story, ridged and yellow with age, Gilman and her counterparts had much difficulty in pushing through the wallpaper of tradition.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the gothic short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. The heroine of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is locked in a room and is not given a voice until it drives her mad. This piece interpreted in conjunction with Simone De Beauvoir’s the Second Sex, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason” illuminate the female plight and the lack of voice given, and Martha C. Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education”. The insanity suffered by the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is caused by “the myth of woman”, the inability of women to have a voice when it is in contradiction to men, and the lack of empathy and compassion the patriarchal society has for women.

John is described as “practical in the extreme” (Gilman 1892, p1) a very rational person who calculates everything before he does it. He does not give in to feelings or emotions and is therefore is unwilling to listen to his wife, when she tries to voice her concerns over her health. She is suffering from depression after the birth of her child and John refuses to believe her when she says she is sick. John, describes his wife’s condition as “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 1892, p. 2).

The first caused of the narrator's eventual insanity is her husband. Her husband does not take her seriously. Numerous times in the story, the narrator would say something to her husband and he would immediately shoot her down with his criticism. Her husband, John, misdiagnosed her with nervous depression. The narrator is actually suffering from post-pardum depression.

Female Hysteria Hysteria of both genders was widely discussed in the medical literature of the nineteenth century. Women were considered to have exhibited a wide array of symptoms according to motherjones.com, which included faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, "wetness between the thighs", muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a tendency to cause trouble. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– In an episode from the series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, a psychiatrist is seen taking care of several women in the 1920’s. Each women highlights a symptom. From years of being told there is something wrong with them, these women have come to believe what they were hearing.

For centuries women in literature have been depicted as weak, subservient, and unthinking characters. Before the 19th century, they usually were not given interesting personalities and were always the proper, perfect and supportive character to the main manly characters. However, one person, in order to defy and mock the norm of woman characterization and the demeaning mindsets about women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." This story, through well crafted symbolisms, brought to surface the troubles that real women face. Her character deals with the feeling of being trapped by the expectations of her husband, with the need to do something creative or constructive, and to have a mind and will of her own. These feelings

The Yellow Wallpaper is a Gothic horror short story written by author Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. The story depicts the struggles many women had to face in the late nineteenth century. The narrator delivers her story through a series of journal entries that she keeps hidden from everyone around her. She is a middle-aged American who is struggling with depression. Her doctor is her husband who often makes light of her mental illness.

Along with the complete and utter seclusion from society, since she is a woman the narrator is not allowed to partake in any of her daily activities. This means the narrator is not permitted to engage in any form of work, including writing, which may have saved her mental stability. This false notion of women being fragile minded supported the inevitable downfall of the narrator. Although writing was not permitted by her male physicians, the narrator documents her descent into madness through brief journal admissions. “And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back (Gilman),” as the narrator rips off the remaining segments of wallpaper from her room, she is tearing away all hopes of becoming sane.

The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story, which is a collection of journal entries, was published in 1892 and is thought of as one of the earliest writings in American feminist literature. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in first person by a women who is married to a doctor. The young couple is renting an old mansion property for three months and are accompanied by the husband’s sister and the couple’s young baby. The main character is thought of as sick by the physician husband, and sentenced to “bed rest” as a form of medial treatment.

Charlotte Gilman revealed that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in the purpose that “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Gilman). The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story written in 1899, is still questioned and analyzed to this day, over one hundred years after it was first published. Although Gilman has formally explained her meaning behind the piece, this has not hampered the countless interpretations of the text made by readers and literary critics alike. The story is one which was quite unlike the literature of the time period, as it is one which questioned social constructs which existed for women and marriages which had not been extensively addressed in society.

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of her society personal identity at the rise of feminism. Especially in the nineteenth century, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men as well as other male influences. " The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her psychological difficulties and her husbands so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her depression during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 to encourage woman independence. She wrote about the changes in marriages and families. This short story focuses on a woman that goes mad from being trapped in room with nothing else to focus on but the yellow wallpaper. Gilman’s life shaped her inspiration for this short story. It was based from her own experience of an unfit marriage and child that leads her to breakdown and have postpartum depression.

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890 and eventually published in 1892 in the New England Magazine and in William Dean Howells' collection, Great Modern American Stories (Shumaker 94). The story was original not only because of its subject matter, but also because it is written in the form of a loosely connected journal. It follows the narrator's private thoughts which become increasingly more confusing. The structure consists of disjointed sentences as the narrator gradually descends more and more into her madness as her only escape from an oppressive husband and society.

The Yellow Wallpaper Introduction The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story of about 6,000 words penned by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who is an American writer (Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 1). It first appeared in January of the year 1892 in a magazine called The New England Magazine. It is critical since it is a feminist book which was a rare thing back then. This is important because of the fact that it focused on the health of women.

This method of justification was used by many prominent nineteenth century British husbands with hysterical wives. In the eyes of British society, the real victims were the husbands or the family members and not the actual person suffering from the illness. It is important to note that the majority of lunacy cases were of women being diagnosed by white males. The sanity of a woman was determined by factors set by society on how a proper lady act and behave.