The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Crazy is a word most often deemed to teenagers, toddlers, and the mentally insane. The protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, could quite easily be described by this word, but I would suggest that rather than crazy, this woman was actually quite intelligent because against all odds, she was able to finally welcome her creative side, it just happened to be in a form that no one had expected. She was not crazy, she was a warrior, trapped in a battle of conscious verses unconscious. Only after completely analyzing the narrator, her physical state, and her mental illness, will we be able to understand the woman in the wallpaper and decide who was victorious in the narrator’s inner battle.

In order to fully understand the narrator’s

However, we cannot be quick to judge John, the husband, for giving this unfortunate advice to his wife because what we are not told is the backstory behind John’s prescription for the narrator. During the time The Yellow Wallpaper took place, Postpartum Depression, anxiety, and many other similar mental illnesses all fell under the umbrella term neurasthenia, which covers many nervous related issues (Stiles). Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a leading psychologist of the time, prescribed his female nervous patients with the same treatment John forced on his wife called the Rest Cure: refraining from writing, “sleep[ing] all [she] can,” and isolation, which explains the sudden three month rental of the house (Mays 533). John was also well aware of Dr. Mitchell and his practices, as the narrator mentions, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall” (Mays 530). Even though it is easy to blame John for the narrator’s insanity at the conclusion of the story, he truly was following the practices of the best psychologists. Once viewed as the ideal treatment, there has now been more research done to show that Mitchell’s Rest Cure actually causes more harm to its patients and the American Psychological Association has labeled this treatment as a, “… striking example of 19th

The Rest Cure calls for complete relaxation of the brain, making the patient do everything in her power to keep from thinking and activating her conscious, which actually pushed the narrator further into her anxiety. As previously mentioned, when a person’s conscious is being threatened, it responds with one or two of eight defense mechanisms: repression, denial, reaction formation, projection, regression, rationalization, displacement, or sublimation (Schultz, Schults 52, 53, 54). John was pushing his wife to use repression, described as when a person represses their emotions, or memories, out of their conscious thoughts, but we can see that this is in fact the opposite of the narrator’s instinctive action because she finds writing soothing: “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (Mays 529). The narrator tells us she enjoys letting her feelings out, which does not correlate with the actions of someone who would find relief in the repression defense mechanism, explaining why John’s tactics caused more harm for his wife. The narrator in the end actually portrays the defense mechanism of projection, explained as “attributing” your own feelings onto another person (Schultz, Schultz 53). In this