The Yellow Wallpaper

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wall-Paper," does more than just tell the story of a woman who suffers at the hands of 19th century quack medicine. Gilman created a protagonist with real emotions and a real psych that can be examined and analyzed in the context of modern psychology. In fact, to understand the psychology of the unnamed protagonist is to be well on the way to understanding the story itself. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in first-person narrative, charts the psychological state of the protagonist as she slowly deteriorates into schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality).

In Charlotte Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jane, the main character, is a good example of Sigmund Freud’s Studies In Hysteria. Jane suffers from symptoms such as story making and daydreaming. Jane has a nervous weakness throughout the story.

and having carefully analyzed the text, I am leaning towards a diagnosis of, major depressive disorder. The observed symptoms, which the protagonist seems to line up with the following symptoms listed in for Major depressive disorder in the DSM-5 checklist provided in the book (Comer, 2014). In the short story, the protagonist has mentioned and expressed with her actions feeling: in a depressed mood for most of the day, Daily diminished interest or pleasure in almost all activates for most of the day, Decrease in daily appetite, experiencing hypersomnia, daily fatigue or loss of energy (Comer, 2014). These things mentioned are symptoms that are categorized as being

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses symbols to portray recovery from the depth of mental illness. The main character, Jane, struggles throughout the story with severe depression. She is constantly haunted by the room she has to occupy during her stay. Yet despite it all, Jane sets herself free from her illness’s grasp. Gilman employs the symbols of the yellow wallpaper, the ripping of the yellow wallpaper, and the beautiful door to depict Jane’s journey out of her depression.

When asked the question of why she chose to write 'The Yellow Wallpaper', Charlotte Perkins Gilman claimed that experiences in her own life dealing with a nervous condition, then termed 'melancholia', had prompted her to write the short story as a means to try and save other people from a similar fate. Although she may have suffered from a similar condition to the narrator of her illuminating short story, Gilman's story cannot be coined merely a tale of insanity. Insanity is the vehicle for Gilman's larger comment on the atrocities of social conformity. The main character of "The Yellow Wallpaper" comes to recognize the inhumanity in society's treatment of women, and in her

The Yellow Paper is a symbolic story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is a disheartening tale of a woman struggling to free herself from postpartum depression. This story gives an account of an emotionally and intellectual deteriorated woman who is a wife and a mother who is struggling to break free from her metal prison and find peace. The post-partum depression forced her to look for a neurologist doctor who gives a rest cure. She was supposed to have a strict bed rest. The woman lived in a male dominated society and wanted indictment from it as she had been driven crazy by as a result of the Victorian “rest-cure.” Her husband made sure that she had a strict bed rest by separating her from her child by taking her to recuperate in

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

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” we are introduced to a woman who enjoys writing. Gilman does not give the reader the name of the women who narrates the story through her stream of consciousness. She shares that she has a nervous depression condition. John, the narrator’s husband feels it is “a slight hysterical tendency” (266). She has been treated for some nervous habits that she feels are legitimately causing harm to her way of life. However she feels her husband, a physician, and her doctor believe that she is embellishing her condition. The woman shares with the reader early in the story that she is defensive of how others around her perceive her emotional state. This causes a small abrasion of animosity that

Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story about an unnamed woman who is dealing with depression and is driven to insanity. In the 1890s, women who suffered from depression or anxiety were not taken seriously by men. Physicians believed that keeping women confined to one compact space with no entertainment would quickly cure them. Therefore, her husband and physician, John, does exactly that. This feeling of being trapped leads to the main character's psychosis because she begins to see an unusual, mysterious figure in the wallpaper.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes the form of journal entries of a woman undergoing treatment for postpartum depression. Her form of treatment is the “resting cure,” in which a person is isolated and put on bed rest. Her only social interaction is with her sister-in-law Jennie and her husband, John, who is also her doctor. Besides small interactions with them, most of the time she is left alone. Society believes all she needs is a break from the stresses of everyday life, while she believes that “society and stimulus” (pg 347, paragraph 16) will make

These "things" are sinister vestiges of ancestry in the natural history of this supposed nursery: barred windows and rings mounted on the wall are more evocative of imprisonment and even torture than they are of children's recreation. Other signs of duress that emerge-the gnawed bedstead, the wallpaper that is stripped at arm's length around the bed, the "smooch" of a shoulder rubbed "round and round and round" at the base of the wall-are all evidence of the behavior of the room's earlier inhabitants and provide evidence of previous habitat adaption for the narrator to study. The feature that is most immediately provocative, and initially aversive, is the room's wallpaper, which appears to grow in fetid ribbons. First the narrator sees only curves in the pattern, but then she finds they "commit suicide" by their motion, and soon she fills the curves with human features-"two bulbous eyes" (6) that have a "vicious influence" (7). Thus far she is resisting her surroundings, pitting herself against its energies and apart from the system of the room.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” though written in 1892, shows how prevalent the challenges of treating mental illness are over 100 years later. It details the account of a woman who is cared for by her husband for her “condition” and the experience she endures as a result. The narrator’s concerns are often dismissed by her superior husband, and she is forced to follow his professional solution that ultimately causes her more harm than good. The story is based off of Gilman’s personal experience with postpartum depression and the subsequent “care” she was given by her male physician, who believed that the best solution was to have Gilman lay in a bed for endless hours with absolutely no activity until the problem resolved itself. Through the story, Gilman addresses how a lack of access to care and the negative stigmas surrounding mental health result in additional pain and suffering.

On the surface, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson can be a confusing short story. The motivations of the narrator and the nature of her illness are not clear. This can be mediated through examining this short story through ideas from Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is trapped in being the Other, as defined in the relationship between men and women by de Beavoir in The Second Sex through the actions and attitudes of her husband, John, and because she lacks means to escape this relegation to Other, it at least in part contributes to her fall into mental illness.

Without question the short story Yellow Wallpaper would definitely be categorized into a male dominant/feminist interpretation. The story is a perfect example of the stereotype, "that a male knows best". Throughout the story the author does a good job of placing you in the women's shoes. He makes you feel the control he has over her, mentally as well as physically.

Feminist studies generally focus on the role that hysterical diagnoses and treatments played in reinforcing the prevailing, male-dominant gender roles through the subversion, manipulation and degrading of female experience through the use of medical treatments and power structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper” is a perfect example of these themes. In writing this story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew upon her own personal experiences with hysteria. The adoption of the sick-role was a product of-and a reaction against gender norms and all of the pressures and tensions that their satisfaction demanded. Gilman’s essay uses autobiographical experiences displayed as doppelganger quality the in the main narrator of the