The Yellow Wallpaper Stigma Essay

  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality.  This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story that portrays a mentally ill young woman. The story is illustrated in first person, narrated by the woman’s point of view. The woman suffers through a nervous depression, and is spending three months in a rented old mansion with her husband and family. Based on her descriptions of her stay, one can tell that she was being oppressed, treated unjustly like many women in this time period. She is oppressed through three connected things, her mental illness, the room in which she is staying, and her husband.

Throughout the story we can see the oppression Gillman faced battling mental illness during the 1800’s. It also indicates that she wrote the story because women's voices were not being heard. Gilman's writing helped to give women a voice. Everyone should have a say in their medical treatment. She brought light to the inferiority that women faced during these times. Gillman’s writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” has significantly helped women and changed the way mental health conditions are treated.

Throughout history, our perception of different topics has changed drastically. For example, our view on slavery or government has changed from accepting the culture normal to accepting almost the exact opposite of the traditional idea. Currently, as a society, we work diligently to alter the ancient view we possess on women and mental illness. Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents a type of person who led her time period in revolutionary ideas. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman illustrates the internal battles of both being a woman in a society controlled by men and a person who suffers from mental illness, at a time when that topic was not commonly discussed. As Mason Cooley says, “every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.” Cooley used this statement to draw attention to the seriousness of mental illness. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman utilizes the diary of the protagonist to illustrate the deeper thoughts of someone suffering from mental illness, while John, both a husband and physician, ignores his wife’s symptoms and believes that she just needs to rest. The ever-changing role of women in society plays an important role in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” By using descriptive imagery, ambiguous scenes and a first person point-of-view, Gilman creates a short story that utilizes setting to critique the gender roles of the nineteenth-century.

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.

At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the protagonist, Jane, has just given birth to a baby boy. Although for most mothers a newborn infant is a joyous time, for others, like Jane, it becomes a trying emotional period that is now popularly understood to be the common disorder, postpartum depression. For example, Jane describes herself as feeling a “lack of strength” (Colm, 3) and as becoming “dreadfully fretful and querulous” (Jeannette and Morris, 25). In addition, she writes, “I cry at nothing and cry most of the time” (Jeannette and Morris, 23).

Also, he overlooks her condition. The narrative states,” John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (3). John, as many men during the time period, oppressed women and overlooked depression unintentionally. John and the Narrator’s brother thought she had “temporary nervous depression” (1) so they did not treat her in the normal matter rather they used the rest cure.

Within this short story many of the health advice the narrator is taking comes from her male relatives that truly wish to cure her of her disease. In spite of the fact that they wish to help out the situation, they end up causing permanent damage to the narrator’s well being. Women were treated as unequal beings, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious (Gilman),” this quote represents the unjust treatment of the narrator. While she is confined in her bedroom, John has the freedom to leave whenever he wishes. Not only does this show the maltreatment of the narrator [women in general], but as she leaps into the uncertainty of craziness it displays the emotional toll such abusive actions have upon

Charlotte Perkins Gilman addresses two distinct social injustices in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She discusses the 19th Century oppression of women and the treatment those with mental illnesses endured. Gilman herself has experience with both injustices, which is why her story is considerably semi-autobiographical. She conjures up fictional story with the help of the realities of society and some factual personal experiences. Gilman exposes the actualities of such injustices in a way that reveals their truths to her readers and condemns those who use and accept them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman parallels the character Jane in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her own experience with and knowledge of women’s oppression and

The epistolary short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, explores the effect of repression, isolation, and lack of stimuli on a woman suffering from mental illness. The narrator, Jane, originally suffering from postpartum depression is forced by her controlling physician husband into a repressive environment that prohibits emotional expression and intellectual stimulation. Jane’s only relief is in her necessarily secret diary entries which are both the readers only insights into the events of the story and Jane’s only source of emotional expression. The expressive nature of how the story is told interestingly contrasts with the oppressiveness of what Jane actually experiences. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” Jane’s ability to honestly express her thoughts and feelings in her hidden diary directly contrasts the extreme repression and internalization of emotions that defines her current life; this contrast throughout the story reveals a correlation between the increase in Jane’s knowledge of herself as well as the repression in her life and the worsening of her mental health.

Mental illness is a pressing condition that requires a doctor’s acceptance and understanding to be treated. One must respect the disorder and be aware of its side effects and characteristics in order to comprehend what is happening to the affected individual. In today’s society, most people are accepting of people’s handicaps and take into consideration their limits, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people were unaccepting of impairments and were quick to misjudge individuals leading them to be wrongly diagnosed. No piece of American literature better demonstrates this concern than Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Gilman uses her background filled with her own struggles with mental illness and the oppression she suffered from her husband and 19th century society due to that illness to illustrate the outcome of a doctor or bystander dismissing the seriousness of the disease. A reader can witness the mental illness and oppression Gilman faced and the consequences of a misdiagnosis through her character Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide “caused” by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealing what we now term as post-partum depression. The woman I met in this story was constantly watched and controlled by her husband to such an extreme that she eventually becomes pychootic and plots to make her escape.

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a young woman’s gradual descent into insanity due to her entrapment, both mentally and physically, in the restrictive cult of domesticity. Through the narrator’s creeping spiral into madness, Gilman seeks to shed light upon the torturous and constraining societal conditions in which women are expected to live, that permeates throughout all aspects of their lives. At first glance to an average reader unfamiliar with Gilman’s history, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to just provide a tale about the oppressive relationship between the man and the woman in a domestic environment, however, once Gilman’s own personal life is uncovered, the story takes on a new level of depth.

Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman once said, ‘’There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver’’. Gilman’s belief that there’s no difference in means of mentality between men or women demonstrated through ‘’The Yellow Wallpaper’’. Gilman symbolically portrays that women suffer from psychological disorders caused by lack of love, care, and a constant pressure of secondary roles and personal unimportance in social life. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about a woman who has a mental illness but cannot heal due to her husband’s lack of belief. The story appears to take place during a time frame where women were oppressed. The short story can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and