Theme Of Insanity In The Yellow Wallpaper

man’s world, but a world that belonged to all humans, and made strides to alter the oppressive social atmosphere in which they lived. In the inspiring short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman used insanity as a form of rebellion to break free of the oppressive influence of the primary male character, the husband. Within Gilman’s short story entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper,” there is a force of oppression in John that symbolizes the whole of Victorian patriarchal society, a society which Gilman fought to eradicate throughout the nineteenth century with countless speeches and works of literature. The “rest cure” that Gilman had endured and that the narrator experienced, “…enforced passivity, lack of physical exercise, lack of intellectual

However, the “rest-cure” of Dr. Mitchell that followed, provoked her to rebel against the practice which treated this “nervous disorder” with stifling intellectual thought, promoting female inferiority. In the short story, “…insanity [is] a form of rebellion against the medical practices and the political policies that have kept women out of professions, denied them their political rights, and kept them under male control in the family and the state” (Quawas). The woman in the story did not succumb to her treatment and become the helpless child her husband wanted her to be, she broke free of her expectations and found her true self through her progressive insanity. Many women at the time were diagnosed with neurosis, a general name for any nervous behavior veering outside the cookie-cutter image of the women they were supposed to be. In fact, “Women’s Rights Advocates believed that neurosis…was a result of women’s repressed anger and enforced passivity and inactivity” (Quawas) that they experienced every day in the home, trying to fit the image they were expected to fill. Because the woman in the story could not protest outright about her role in society, she used her insanity to liberate her from her duties as wife and mother. The woman in the story expresses her need for a role other than what is expected of her by saying “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change would do me good” (Gilman 479), a quote that defines the “New Woman” as something other than just a housewife. Throughout the short story, the woman avoids her duties and questions/defies her husband by allowing the maid Jennie to take care of the baby and run the household. She also defies her husband by questioning the efficiency of her treatment and continuing to write in her journal although she is forbidden,