Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

In the 19th century, women were resigned to live without independence- confined to the domestic sphere. Their idle lives were dominated by their husband’s whims and desires, which left them with little autonomy. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of these women and wrote several works to reflect on the patriarchal society that led women to lead unfulfilled lives. In The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Gilman uses the story of a woman’s depression and descent into madness to reflect on society’s unfair treatment of women and its effect on them. The story opens, journal entry style, with the narrator telling of her and her family’s “vacation” to an old house in the country. She has some reservations about it, since the rent is so cheap, but her

She then goes on to reveal that she is ill, but neither John nor her brother, who are both esteemed physicians, believe her to have a serious sickness. The narrator's husband, John, acts as her doctor and diagnoses her with “temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency” and forbids her to work, which includes writing and thinking too much, until she gets better (Gilman 2). Immediately it is recognizable that the narrator seems more concerned with her illness than the men in her life. Also, she does not agree with her husband’s course of treatment, yet she keeps quiet and is forced to trust her husband/doctor. John ignores his wife’s experiences and dismisses her symptoms by attributing her issues essentially to being a woman and having a “fanciful mind.” This is a deliberate representation of society denying women the right to be heard and taken seriously. John’s trivial diagnosis of his wife is also a metaphor for society using science as a guise to “define a woman’s condition” (Treichler 61-77). Society used science and medicine as a way to categorize women’s problems and to give “objective proof” that they were insignificant. This thinly veiled misogyny bled into the

It begins with our narrator revealing her exhaustion with everyday life. She feels very weak, yet has bouts of self doubt about the gravity of her sickness due to everyone telling her that it is all in her head. It is also revealed that she has a baby and cannot see him because he makes her nervous. This is significant and gives new weight to the story because it hints that the narrator’s illness could be postpartum depression. The fact that postpartum depression only occurs in women factors into its trivialization. In this section, the narrator begins to grow obsessed by the yellow wallpaper in her room. To no avail, she follows the patterns for hours trying to make sense of them. She even starts to see “broken necks” and “bulbous eyes” in the wallpaper (Gilman 3). Due to this disturbance, the narrator asks her husband to replace the wallpaper, but he rejects the request and she drops the topic because she does not want to be an inconvenience. The narrator, like other women in this time, were expected to compromise themselves for their husbands. A woman was supposed to make sure her husband was comfortable, even at a cost to herself. If she became unhappy she would have to conceal it, as shown in The Yellow Wallpaper. The narrator cries much of the day but puts up a facade and conceals her suffering from her husband. She can feel her mental state declining and tries to convince