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The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Health

Decent Essays

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story set in a 19th century colonial mansion, in which the narrator and her husband stay for the summer. The narrator, who is unnamed, is undergoing a rest cure for some kind of mental illness after giving birth. This mental illness is now known as postpartum depression. Rest cure involves doing absolutely nothing and this triggered the further deterioration of the narrator’s mental health. Her husband, John, monitors her condition while they stay in the mansion. She is confined in a room— supposedly a nursery room— with barred windows and scratches on the floor. The most noticeable feature of the room by the narrator is the yellow wallpaper. Each day, her description of the yellow wallpaper becomes more disturbing; from being just plain wallpaper to being a prison cell for trapped women, shaking the bars, wanting to be free from it. Instead of getting well from the rest cure, the narrator’s mental state worsened as what is depicted in her journal entries. She eventually goes mad and her husband fainted from the sight of her condition.
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This is most recognizable within the sixth journal entry of the narrator: “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes” (qtd. in Gardner 83). Remember that the rest cure she is undergoing prevents her to do anything aside from endlessly observing the yellow wallpaper and secretly writing on her journal. Nobody, even John, notices that the rest cure is doing her more harm than cure— and she is the only one who can say that it is the actual case. The quoted text epitomizes the fact that her condition is getting worse each day and nobody listens to her because she is a woman. As what is discussed in class, the oppression of women then caused some women to lose their

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