The Yellow Wallpaper The Rest Cure Analysis

The Yellow Wallpaper and the Rest Cure

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which takes place at the end of the 19th century, an unnamed narrator’s mental state deteriorates from both a severe postpartum depression and the ‘rest cure’ prescribed to her by her husband, a doctor who believes she needs three months of absolute rest in order to gain her sanity back. In the late 19th century, the ‘rest cure” was a widely used method curated by neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell. It was a method of restricting all movement a woman did and putting her on strict bed rest until she was “cured”. The technique really demonstrated how women during this time period were treated and looked down upon compared to men. In spite the fact that the husbands of these women had their best interest at heart, they were doing more harm than good to their wives. While at the time it sounded like a good idea to take away all stress from a stressed woman and restrict her to little to no activities, it ends up driving the woman mad because she is no longer taken seriously and just looked at as a broken object. In her short story, Gilman uses

“The Yellow Wallpaper” as a way to symbolically show the problematic way women were treated during the latter part of the 19th century.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman exaggerates her own personal experiences to demonstrate the negative effects the ‘rest cure’ has on woman. Gilman says that during her three prescribed months on the rest cure, she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” (Gilman 1). Gilman stated that she “never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations” (Gilman 1) like the narrator in the story did, she hoped the embellishment of her situation brought attention to the serious problem the ‘rest cure’ was causing in woman. In fact, one he read “The Yellow Wallpaper,
the doctor that prescribed Gilman herself the rest cure “altered his treatment of neurasthenia” (Gilman 1). Gilman’s ultimate goal was to save some people the pain that she endured from the rest cure, and that she did.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” whilst locked in her room, the narrator soon becomes fixated on the unpleasant wallpaper covering the walls of the room.

Considering she has nothing else to do, she stares at the wallpaper in the room all day and begins to obsess over it and slowly but surely starts to loose her mind. The narrator states that she begins to “see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.” (Gilman 6) on the wallpaper. When in reality, her dwindling mental state due to the ‘rest cure’ is causing her to see herself in the wallpaper and see the wallpaper come to life. The narrator also believes that “there is something else about that paper-- the smell!”. (Gilman 11). The hallucinations are all a result of the ‘rest cure’ meant to help

her.
Finally, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator has officially lost her last trace of sanity and is ‘set free’ from her mind when she loses her her grip on reality and creeps around her room with the other women who have ‘escaped’ from the wall. “But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” (Gilman 15). When her husband enters the room and sees her creeping alongside the wall, he is so shocked he faints right there on the spot, and the narrator just continues to move around him. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over
him every time!” The rest cure finally ‘broke’ the narrator and she is finally free from her husband, but

the freedom comes with a cost of her healthy mental state.

In conclusion, the entirety of “The Yellow Wallpaper” symbolically represents the struggle

woman in the late 19th century went through when they had mental health problems. Once prescribed

the rest cure, there is almost no escaping the dangerous path to losing their sanity. Unfortunately, during this time, woman, the real victims, had no say in the matter and just had to listen to what their ‘stronger’ male counterparts had to say about their feelings. Therefore, women's mental health was treated in a very problematic and harmful way during 19th century America.