The Physician In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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In Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" there are a few possible reasons as to why she made both the narrator's husband and her brother physicians. One of the main reasons could have been to not only show how futile the advice of physicians was, but what happens when one is forced to obey it. It would have been different had she gone to see a regular physician. She could have neglected to take the advice offered to her and found her own way to treat herself. That being said, in this particular case, both the narrator's husband and brother are physicians. Although her husband is a physician, she doesn't believe that his advice is helping her at all, "John is a physician, and perhaps---(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead …show more content…

She follows this up immediately by describing the unfortunate circumstance she finds herself in, "If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression---a slight hysterical tendency---what is one to do?" (486) It does not help her case that her brother is also a physician, "My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing" (486). By the end of the story, she goes from describing the woman confined within the wallpaper to becoming the woman herself. However, she could have avoided this had her husband and brother taken Gillman's advice. After following her physician's advice for a while before recognizing how harmful it was, Gillman described what ultimately cured her, "Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power"

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