Mental Illnession In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Stetson

In the late 1800s, a lot was not known about mental illnesses and due to this the unnamed narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper suffers from this ignorance. The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson in 1891 for the New England Magazine as the author had suffer from a similar situation as the story’s narrator. In the short story, we are introduced to an unnamed woman who seems to be suffering from some sort of mental illness. The narrator's husband, who is a physician, forces her to do nothing to try and help her condition, but ironically this has the opposite effect on the narrator's condition. The narrator is driven slowly mad by a yellow wallpaper in her room which instead of helping her condition it makes things worse. The

The narrator comments on how someone else takes care of her baby. The narrator writes that whenever she is near him she becomes nervous (Stetson 649). The idea of reproduction comes up in Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper as the story delivers a message that in the time that the story takes place, it is a women’s place to bear children and nothing else (Oakley 31). This sentiment may be the cause of the narrator’s depression as she does not see herself as anyone but a mother to her husband and she has no purpose thus leading to melancholy and tiredness. The relationship of being just someone to bear a child may be one reason for how she has an unhealthily relationship with her

The narrator is barred from doing anything and trapped in a room she hates. The narrator must write in her journal secretly because if her husband finds out, he will forbid her from doing any more writing. Due to her illness, she is given the rest cure which only makes her health worse. Also, the husband uses their child as leverage to keep her in her place. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper": A Surrealistic Portrayal of a Woman's Arrested Development quotes Charlotte Perkins Gilman who says that she wrote the Yellow Wallpaper as a revolt against the fact that men deny woman all humanity and women are largely ignored in the nineteenth century (Hall 2). The Yellow Wallpaper uses its narrator to display the treatment of women and their condition should any of them break from the normal occupation that their husbands direct to