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In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about the struggles of living with mental illness at the time. The main character, whose name may or may not be Jane, suffers from postpartum depression, a mental illness and form of depression that is taken on by some women after giving birth to their newborn child. Her husband, a physician simply passes it off as hysteria. He believes she is simply losing her mind, and in a way, she is. In an attempt to help his wife, John, her husband, prescribes her bed rest and gets a house on the countryside to stay in for a while.
However, the more time she spends there, the worse off she becomes.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, CT in 1860. She lived with her mother and brother after her father left the family. Gilman had 3 brilliant and famous aunts: Isabella Beecher Hooker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Catherine Stowe. All three were heavily invested in human rights.
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With some financial help from her uninvested father, she enrolled in design school. Later, she supported herself by illustrating ads. In 1884 she married and gave birth. In the years after her birth, Charlotte experienced a series of “nervous disorders.” Her physician told her to live as domestic of a life as she could. This included never touching pen, paper, or brush again. This only made her situation worse and was ultimately her inspiration for “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She took her husband and her daughter to California where she flourished economically.
She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” taught social reform classes, and led rallies. However, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and committed suicide in 1935. (Biography, 2014).
The Yellow Wallpaper is the first-person narrative of a 19th century woman suffering from a mental breakdown after giving birth. In a secret diary, this narrator describes her setting as, “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity – but that would be asking too much of fate!” (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892). This narrator is confined to a room with barred windows. It’s possible that she’s in an asylum, but the physical setting is less important than another landscape: the shifting consciousness of her mind. The narrator knows that she perceives reality differently from her husband, who is also her doctor. At first, she chalks this up to the expected difficulties of male/female relations. She writes, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892). This expectation of marriage is of course troubling in its own write, but there is an even darker side to their dynamic. John has almost complete control over his wife’s body.
He prescribes her a scheduled prescription for each hour in the day of phosphates, tonics, journeys, fresh air, and exercise. Also, John forbids his wife from writing, working or socializing (just like Gilman). It turns out the so-called “cures” are only making the narrator’s condition worse. So, all she has to do in her spare time is stare at the yellow wallpaper. Again, the narrator is experiencing postpartum depression. This can be caused by a drop in hormone production after child birth. Also, typically new parents experience anxiety and sleep-deprivation.
At the start of the story, she craves more society and stimulus. She writes that she must say what she feels and thinks in some way. Forbidden from communicating with a living soul, she secretly confesses her thoughts to dead paper in a journal. In her writing she projects her mental disintegration onto the patterns that she sees on the walls. “I never saw a worse paper in my life,” she writes (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892). She explains that it contains one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. Still, she finds this pattern compelling. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892). This describes the narrator’s interior landscape, but it also describes the story. Initially, it seems dull, but then it becomes confusing. The wallpaper seems to be moving, the narrator doesn’t seem to be trustworthy, and then something becomes pronounced enough to provoke further study. These sightings in the wall could be a description of a failing marriage and the desire for some sort of connection in the tangled design. Also, they could be suicidal musings, exemplified by the lines seeming to spiral out of control and then end abruptly.
Eventually the narrator starts seeing something more in the paper. “I think there are a great many women behind and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. She aims to free this woman, or women. On her last day in the house, she locks her door, throws out the key, and ties herself to the bed. She rips at the wallpaper and thinks that it would be an admirable exercise to throw herself out the window. Then she wedges her shoulder into a smudge that runs along the lower part of the wall and creeps along the periphery of the room. This hunched walking reflects how she sees the woman in the wall.
John finally enters the room. When he sees his wife, he faints. However, she continues her walk around the room. She crawls over the body of the man who had oppressed her and put her in this situation. “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane!” (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1982). Jane had not been mentioned up to this point. It seems Jane is the narrator, and whoever is now speaking is the broken form of Jane, which is why she refers to Jane as a different person.
The story has served a personal function. It has given form and expression to many people’s experiences with mental illness. It is a story that explores the ways that physiological brain disorders can be hurt or helped by treatments and by the way the social order imagines and talks about mental illness. Although society no longer embrace rest cures, it still has a long way to go when it comes to talking about mental illness without the stigmatization that can worsen suffering. But also, mental illness in the way it is discussed is not the only “Yellow Wallpaper” out there. The paper ultimately symbolizes restraints from personal demons. How people escape it is up to them.
"The Yellow Wallpaper": A Psychological Horror. (2021, Mar 22). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-a-psychological-horror-essay
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