Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Researcher, Beverly A. Hume, claims that Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper “on her experiences with S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘rest cure’ treatment” (Hume 478). The rest cure treatment aforementioned is described as the “treatment of disease... by rest and isolation in a good hygienic environment” (Merriam-Webster). In “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman explained that she followed the advice of her physicians for nearly three months and then “cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again.” Gilman mentions how she initially wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with the intentions to let her physician know that his rest cure recommendations were enough to drive someone into “mental ruin,” but he never acknowledged her short story. Some criticized Gilman in saying that her work could drive someone mad, but she clearly states that “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (“Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”). Through her heroic-like attempt to prevent others from being driven crazy, she created a work highlighting the oppression of women, directly displaying the mistreatment of female patients,

Greg Johnson, a professor in the English department of Kennesaw State University, takes note of how the narrator was treated as a patient in a type of hospital, potentially a mental ward, with how the “windows of her room are barred, and just outside the door is a gate,” not forgetting to mention that even “her bed, [was] nailed to the floor” (526). The treatment of the narrator, who was a seemingly normal woman at the beginning, led her to behavior that could be described as “an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown” (522). This rage builds continuously through the story aimed almost always at