The Mistreated and the Mislabeled. Physicians who are gender bias tend to misdiagnose and mistreat patients because of their ignorance and poor communication. The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a captivating socio-political allegory expressing how cultural expectations can shape and effect the mind of a creative woman suffering from what could be assumed to be a severe case of postpartum depression. Gilman, uses a unique epistolary form point of view using the journal belonging to a character assumed to be by the name of Jane, who is the wife and patient of a physician named John. She provides a chilling and alluring setting to vividly depict the grave consequences of gender bias doctors who are mistreating and mislabeling She valued self-expression in which inspired her story, The Yellow Wallpaper, it is said to be a “…painful episode in Gilman’s own life,” (Spark Notes). It is important to take into account the background of the author. Gilman, was once a married woman with a newborn child. Gilman suffered from “…severe and continuous nervous breakdowns tending to melancholia—and beyond,” (258). In her, Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman, goes into depth about her experience with the rest cure invented by, Weir Mitchell. Gilman claims she, “…went home and obeyed [the treatment] for some three months, and [she] came so near the border line of utter mental ruin…” (258). With this being said Gilman, writes her short story to aid women in similar situations and even to prevent women from falling into the same demise. Our main character, Jane moves into an ancestral hall for the summer under the care of her physician who is also her husband. Jane is diagnosed with “…temporary nervous depression [and] a slight hysterical tendency…” (Gilman 648) although she realizes there is more to her illness than temporary nervous, her husband time after time ignores her wishes claiming to know best for her. Throughout the story despite her husband’s orders for limited mental activity, Jane writes in a journal and keeps written accounts of her time in the At first sight she describes the wallpaper as, “[o]ne of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin,” (Gilman 648) declaring she had “…never saw a worse paper in [her] life.” Although her husband strictly forbids her to journal, Jane, continues to confide to her journal writing, “…this is dead paper and a great relief to [her] mind…” (Gilman 647). As the story progresses Jane writes that she is getting much worse and so does her fixation with the yellow wallpaper. She spends much time alone in this room with barred windows and bolted furniture. The confinement she is experiencing leads her to begin hallucinating a creeping woman through the wallpaper. As a creative woman Jane falls into her demise due to lack of mental stimulation slowly but surely her obsession takes over and the yellow wallpaper is all she looks forward to. Throughout the story the wallpaper begins be personified by Jane as a monster of some sorts staring at her with bulbous eyes. Her descriptions of the whole estate begin to shift perspective and she pleas John to take her away from the mansion. Despite her pleas they continue their stay. Jane transforms her horrid fixation into fascination she follows it for hours a day and feeling
Misogynistic Confinement Yellow Wallpaper depicts the nervous breakdown of a young woman and is an example as well as a protest of the patriarchal gender based treatments of mental illness women of the nineteenth century were subjected to. The narrator begins the story by recounting how she speculates there may be something wrong with the mansion they will be living in for three months. According to her, the price of rent was way too cheap and she even goes on to describe it as “queer”. However, she is quickly laughed at and dismissed by her husband, who as she puts it “is practical in the extreme.” As the story continues, the reader learns that the narrator is thought to be sick by her husband John, yet she is not as convinced as him.
In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator of the story is a woman who is struggling with her mental health. Throughout the story, she progressively gets worse in her condition, due to the lack of mental health awareness, and her treatment plan. To start off, she is given the “rest” method of treatment.This is a treatment that focuses on letting the brain rest due to the thought that mental health issues were just a matter of an overactive or overstimulated mind. The narrator’s husband is the reason why her condition continued to get slowly worse, his main concerns were making her normal again, even if he hurt her in the process. Although this story can be interpreted many ways, through symbolism and
Due to Jane’s husband enforcing a life in confinement due to her nervous breakdowns, it only takes a little time for the isolation to drive her mad. In the beginning of the story, it is clear that the narrator, Jane, suffers from post-natal depression, which is a common effect after childbirth. The way Jane sees her living quarters is much different than it actually is. She imagines the rings on the walls, the torn up wallpaper, and the bars on the windows as a nursery or a school for boys, when those features actually lead the audience to realize that it is a room for the mentally ill. Her husband, also her physician, believes that in order for her metal illness to be cured is to forbid her from exercising her imagination, working, and to keep her locked away. However, his theory proves to be wrong when her mind begins to see a world inside the wallpaper, caused by the abuse from confinement. Although her husband is doing this for what he thinks is best for her well
Throughout the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we see a woman handicapped by depression and mental illness. We see how the narrator and John interact as husband and wife and as doctor and patient. From the surface, it seems as if John is a kind-hearted man wanting what is best for his wife, and willing to do whatever it takes to make her better again. But as the reader looks closer and the story progresses, John becomes more of a handicap to his wife than the illness itself. Gilman uses John's detriment to Charlotte as a way to describe the gender roles, professional and medial, in the nineteenth century. She uses this parallelism as a way to break the patriarchal society's oppression on women and the idea of women's only role being in the household.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through such treatments. Because of her experience with the rest cure, it can even be said that Gilman based the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" loosely on herself. But I believe that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman/women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.
Frightening details begin to unfold about the room, including: barred windows, a bolted down bed, and of course, the wallpaper itself (227). Gilman uses the imagery to create an air of suspense and insinuates the narrator’s coming fall into insanity. The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in large, leads to the narrator’s collapse. Almost instantly, the narrator’s already unstable mind perceives a ghostliness that begins to set her even more on edge. Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s tantalizing short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the horrifying tale of a nineteenth century woman whose husband condemns her to a rest cure, a popular approach during the era to treat post-partum depression. Although John, the unnamed narrator’s husband, does not truly believe his wife is ill, he ultimately condemns her to mental insanity through his treatment. The story somewhat resembles Gilman’s shocking personal biography, namely the rest cure she underwent under the watchful eye of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, two years after the birth of her daughter, Katherine. Superficially, the rest cure the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" endures loosely replicates Gilman’s personal anguish as she underwent such a treatment. More complexly, however, the story both accentuates and indirectly criticizes the oppression women faced in both marriage and motherhood.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions which society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria. The narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression." In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
American feminist Bell Hooks states “Being oppressed means the absence of choices” which was a representation of many women in the Victorian era. During the Victorian Era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote one of the first feminist stories. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a woman who suffered postpartum depression during a period of time when it was believed to be normal. Being isolated from everyone was one of the directions she had to follow according to the rest cure treatment she was prescribed after being diagnosed with hysteria. In the story, the narrator is taken to a colonial mansion, restricted only to a room on the third floor with a powerful yellow wallpaper which contained scratch marks that resembled prison bars, and
As the reader knows, Jane does most of her sneaking around at night when her husband is not around because she knows he would not approve. Jane begins to make it her life’s mission to free the woman trapped behind the pattern of the wallpaper, which could be interpreted as society holding the woman back from freedom. Jane becomes rather obsessed with the wallpaper and taking it down from the walls. She becomes very sneaky and secluded to the room where she watches for the woman to appear behind the
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tells the story of a woman's descent into madness as a result of the "rest and ignore the problem cure" that is frequently prescribed to cure hysteria and nervous conditions in women. More importantly, the story is about control and attacks the role of women in society. The narrator of the story is symbolic for all women in the late 1800s, a prisoner of a confining society. Women are expected to bear children, keep house and do only as they are told. Since men are privileged enough to have education, they hold jobs and make all the decisions. Thus, women are cast into the prison of acquiescence because they live in a world dominated by men. Since men suppress women, John, the narrator's husband, is presumed to have control over the protagonist. Gilman, however, suggests otherwise. She implies that it is a combination of society's control as well as the woman's personal weakness that contribute to the suppression of women. These two factors result in the woman's inability to make her own decisions and voice opposition to men.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in the first person narrative of a women's secret journal and her descent into madness. With the medical community of the nineteenth century misunderstanding and mistreating women, despite the protests of women. The treatment that John, the narrator’s husband, offers does not help at all, in fact throughout the story the narrator’s journal entrees and condition progressively worsens. Spending the summer in an abandoned mansion in order to recover from what her physician husband believes is a “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” (648). Her husband does not believe that her illness is serious the narrator states,“You see he does not believe I am sick” (647)! According to history men thought that they knew better than women, especially women who were “hysterical.” ...
Although both protagonists in the stories go through a psychological disorder that turns their lives upside down, they find ways to feel content once again. In Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, damp room covered in musty wallpaper all play important roles in driving the wife insane. Gilman's masterful use of not only the setting, both time and place, but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to process the woman's growing insanity. The narrator develops a very intimate relationship with the yellow wallpaper throughout the story, as it is her constant companion. Her initial reaction to it is a feeling of hatred; she dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but does not attribute anything peculiar to it. Two weeks into their stay she begins to project a sort of personality onto the paper, so she studies the pattern more closely, noticing for the first time “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman). At this point, her madness is vague, but becoming more defined, because although the figure that she sees behind the pattern has no solid shape, she dwells on it and
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story told from the first person point of view of a doctor's wife who has nervous condition. The first person standpoint gives the reader access only to the woman’s thoughts, and thus, is limited. The limited viewpoint of this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the wife feels throughout the story. The point of view is also limited in that the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no benefit of hindsight, and is never able to actually see that the men in her life are part of the reason she never gets well. This paper will discuss how Gilman’s choice of point of view helps communicate the central theme of the story- that women of the time were viewed as being subordinate to men. Also, the paper will discuss how ignoring oneself and one’s desires is self-destructive, as seen throughout the story as the woman’s condition worsens while she is in isolation, in the room with the yellow wallpaper, and her at the same time as her thoughts are being oppressed by her husband and brother.
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in it's quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce (Lauter 799). Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.