Insanity and Feminism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

In the “yellow wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which was written 1892, is a feminist story that has many interesting themes. In this story, there is a sense of insanity as the story continues due to the continued exposure to the wallpaper. This story is protesting a method called the rest cure, which the author herself was subjected to, and can cause people to be driven insane, but also protest the treatment of woman in a time when they did not have any agency. This cure, which was almost always given to women, was not just for women who actually had an illness it was also given to women who were different. The women who did not abide by the social norms of the time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman went to see a specialist in the hope of curing

She starts to become obsessed with the wallpaper and starts to think that there is someone, a woman, trapped in it. The woman that she sees trapped in the wallpaper the first time it is described as “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (32). The wallpaper at night “becomes bars”(32). She is projecting herself into the woman that she sees in the wallpaper she feels trapped so she imagines a woman trapped in the paper shaking the bars wanting to get out. The narrator says that during the day the woman is “subdued quiet”. The wallpaper becoming like bars in the dark also adds to the imagery that she feels trapped. Her fascination with the wallpaper starts to consume her. All she does throughout the day is stare at the paper since she cannot do anything

The mental restrictions more than the physical ones, are what eventually drive her to insanity. She feels like she has to hide her anxieties and fears in order to preserve the façade of a happy marriage and to make it seem as though she is actually getting better. The most unbearable aspect of her treatment is the silence and idleness of the “resting cure”, she is forced to become completely passive and prohibited from exercising her mind in any way. The narrator’s eventual insanity is a result of the repression of her imagination, not the expression of it. She is constantly longing for an emotional and intellectual outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal. For Gilman, a mind that is kept in a state of forced inactivity is doomed to self-destruction. This rest cure was a way to control, women to make them