Yellow Wallpaper Diary

Written in a series of diary entries from the perspective of a woman suffer from postpartum depression, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, opens up with the narrator describing a large, ornate home that she and her husband have rented for the summer. As a practical man, John the husband, is a physician and it was his desire to move out into the country to expose his suffering wife to clean air, and a calmer lifestyle so that she may recover from what he sees as a ‘temporary nervous depression.’
In the diary entries the narrator complains that her husband does not listen to her worries about her condition, and often treats her like a child. In the home she senses something mysterious, and strange. Before they had

The yellow wall paper, for which the story is named, plays a major role. The narrator becomes obsessed with deciphering its illogical, incomprehensible pattern. She writes in her diary that she feels the wallpaper contains a malevolent force that threatens the home. When left alone she studies the wallpaper and begins to imagine seeing a figure within it. Once she realizes this she tries to convince her husband to leave the home, but John feels she is improving and wants to stay. The narrator declines in mental state, the obsession of the wallpaper takes over, she writes in her diary that she believes she is starting to make sense of the pattern; she grows paranoid of her husband and sister Jennie. The top pattern of the wallpaper contains stripes which she believes are bars, and behind the bars she feels there is a trapped woman who creeps whom she is determined to

When Gilman got married to Charles Walter Gilman, she soon got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. After the birth she developed post-partum depression, she was prescribed by S. Weir Mitchell the unsuccessful ‘rest-cure.’ After divorcing her husband, and moving to Pasadena, California she became an active voice for the feminist movement. She developed breast cancer, and was diagnosed in 1932, she committed suicide in 1935, because she felt it was preferable to death by cancer. Gilman was writing at the beginning of the progressive era in America. This time was for people who expressed their art to contribute to the national conversation about social issues. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was the reason S. Weir Mitchell abandoned the