`` Yellow Wallpaper `` By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman in, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman suffering from postpartum depression and her solitary inactive treatment in a yellow wallpapered room. Gilman herself experienced postpartum depression in her life and experienced the even more depressing treatment with it. She lived during the late nineteenth century where women were mostly confined around the, “domestic circle,” and could not participate in technical or intellectual activities outside the household hindering any development. She uses this short story as a social and political commentary to speak out against the status quo of women's gender oppression through her use of setting, development of characters, and symbolism of the woman trapped in the

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.

Hysteria is mentioned almost immediately in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi- autobiographical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. We encounter the narrator through epistolary-like entries that she tells us is in a journal. The main character is a well off, married woman who is suffering from, what we now know to be, post-partum depression. She is taken by her husband to an isolated country house where she can rest, and upon their arrival to the house she is placed in a former nursery covered in a hideous, yellow wallpaper; which slowly drives her insane.

She was born in July of 1860 to a prominent family with her father’s side stemming back to Isabella Beecher Hooker a profound suffragist and Harriet Beecher Stowe the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a well known abolitionist (Beekman 1). When reading her works, the reader can distinctly see where Gilman’s ancestry has touched the pages of her work, and encouraged her to intrepidly record her viewpoints, along with personal experiences in the form of literature for the world to read. One of those personal experiences began in 1884 when Gilman married Walter Stetson, and only ten months later gave birth to their daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson. As Gilman had previously feared, becoming a wife and mother soon redirected her life away from her aspirations, a devastating reality she was not yet ready to face. As time went on, Gilman fell into depression, the remedy to which was thought to be Mitchell’s resting cure.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman starts “The Yellow Wallpaper” with the narrative of a character in first person perspective. Gilman writes in a style and attitude that is reflective of the character 's feelings towards her current situation. The character’s doctor who is coincidentally her husband decided it was best to move her into a remote house for some time away to get plenty of rest and to heal mentally. The character was moved into a nursery that was covered with yellow wallpaper and as time passed the character started to go insane from the seclusion. The character in the story describes her relationship with her husband, John, while explaining how she feels towards him after he excluded her. The character’s sanity transforms into an irrational mentality after her attitude transitions from positive to negative, from her husband’s condescending tone and excessive control, and when she is left constantly alone in seclusion causing her to hallucinate.

Women has always been pushed down in society. They have always been told what to do by a man, because the man “knows what is best for a woman.” This idea still exists today in some parts of the world. An example of this is shown in a short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written in 1973 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This gothic piece portrays Gilman’s life as a female in the nineteenth century with postpartum depression. She gives real life example of what her life was as a female with this kind of disorder.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a woman with mental illness that only gets worse as time goes on written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator’s husband, who is also her doctor, tries to help her but what he does only hinders her. This story is narrated by the mentally unstable wife, trapped in her home. She starts off by writing journals, even though her husband tells her not too. In The Yellow Wallpaper she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom. The theme of The Yellow Wallpaper is obsession and depression.

During the 19th century European and American women lived during a time in which was characterized by gender inequality. In the beginning of the century, women enjoyed only a few of the legal, social, or political rights that we now take for granted: they could not vote, and were barred from institutions of higher education. Women were expected to remain obedient to their fathers and husbands. Occupational choices were also tremendously limited. Middle- and upper-class women generally remained home, caring for their children and running the home. Lower-class women often did work outside the home, but usually as poorly-paid domestic servants or laborers in factories or mills. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s essay The Yellow Wallpaper addressed and portrayed these many issues that women faced during this time.

Madness is what essentially haunts humans. Whether they are born with it or it is brought upon, it leaves a blurred rush of lunacy in its habitants minds. Competently so, a handful of these beings can write and express these tangled minds into compositions that leave the reader cognized and fascinated. Respectably, an author that always seems to come along any viewer’s mind is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, known especially for her controversial short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. The piece deals with a woman who is on a forced vacation from her conventional role as a wife and a mother, diagnosed and treated by her doctor as well as her husband for a slight case of depression. Her primary “treatment” for this is predominantly a week-long stay in an ugly, yellow wallpaper-covered secluded room where she sits and “rests” mostly alone for an extended period of time. In the story, Gilman confronts ideas of isolation from her main character’s world, drawing out attributes from wallpaper and its designs to represent the escape from the society in which she lives in. Alike, she also ties the ideas of loneliness into this character’s stream-of-consciousness by discussing her situation in a passive mindset. Moreover, by using different symbols and stream-of-consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates the deterioration of a female’s mental health when forced into isolation in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

I thought that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was a great piece because of its meaning and message. The messages that Charlotte Perkin Gilman portrays in the story are very powerful and, given the biographical background, are clearly derived from her own experiences as a woman during the 19th century. I felt empathy for the main character as her depression worsened and her mental state progressively declined. I felt like the main character felt very isolated and unheard. No one seemed to be able to understand her issues or could relate to the way she was feeling. Only in her journal could she express the feeling of oppression and loneliness that she had. I feel as though if her husband were to read her journal that he might also empathize with his

Numerous interpretations have been constructed on what the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” actually intends to portray to the reader; it has been analyzed by many scholars over the years. It was written in the nineteenth-century by Charlotte Perkins Gilman who was known to write about the dangers that existed with fixed gender roles along with the patriarchal model which ensured power for men. The males were to maintain the public sphere outside of the home, providing for the family and the women were to remain inside of the home keeping the domestic sphere. Notably, women portrayed the submissive role beneath the male-dominated society. The husband “John” is a doctor that takes his wife “the narrator” to a rental home to rehabilitate from her

Gilman’s work takes place sometime in what seems to be the middle of the 19th century. The story is written in the first person in the form of many journal entries all tied into one. The woman narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, is currently suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband, John, is a doctor who has prescribed her to the, “rest cure,” which is a worked up term for bed rest (Gilman 76). This cure allows little to no activities and almost no mental stimulation. Although being prescribed this form of treatment, the narrator defies her husband and chooses to write anyways (Gilman 78). Postpartum depression is an illness caused by an extreme misbalance of hormones after child birth. The mother’s state of mind is compromised and her thoughts can very easily become irrational. As Gilman’s

“Aesthetically disorganized and confusing, its frenzied design representing a break from the straightforward, instructional acclimated patterns”: the trademarks of yellow journalism (*****). The increasingly dominating war for customers between newspapers employed sensational writing, consisting of inaccurate journalism, printed on cheap yellow paper, coining the term ‘Yellow Journalism’ in 1896. Although yellow journalism not yet proper terminology during Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s publishing of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, sensational writing was present during the story’s publication. Gilman was a literary author who opposed the increase of the sensational press that threatened her position as an author in its frequent personal attacks on her and its refusal to print non-sensational or serious writing. Similarly Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” recounts the plight of a woman

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a gothic fiction short story that includes feminist perspectives. According to one scholar, the story “is used to remind contemporary readers of the enduring import of the feminist struggle against patriarchal domination” (Haney-Peritz 114). The unnamed narrator is stuck in “a colonial mansion” that she describes as “a haunted house” (Gilman 468). The setting is a big house with only her and her husband, John, living in it. She is stuck in the big mansion because John, who is also her physician, says she has a “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 468). As part of her treatment she is told to rest until she feels better. John and her brother says she is “absolutely

with a rest cure. The doctor in the story is much like the doctor that