Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Researcher, Beverly A. Hume, claims that Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper “on her experiences with S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘rest cure’ treatment” (Hume 478). The rest cure treatment aforementioned is described as the “treatment of disease... by rest and isolation in a good hygienic environment” (Merriam-Webster). In “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman explained that she followed the advice of her physicians for nearly three months and then “cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again.” Gilman mentions how she initially wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with the intentions to let her physician know that his rest cure recommendations were enough to drive someone into “mental ruin,” but he never acknowledged her short story. Some criticized Gilman in saying that her work could drive someone mad, but she clearly states that “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (“Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”). Through her heroic-like attempt to prevent others from being driven crazy, she created a work highlighting the oppression of women, directly displaying the mistreatment of female patients,

and expressing the misconceptions about mental illnesses.
The purpose of The Yellow Wallpaper, as stated by Hume, was to expose the “medical ignorance upon a normal but relatively intelligent nineteenth-century woman” (482).

Greg Johnson, a professor in the English department of Kennesaw State University, takes note of how the narrator was treated as a patient in a type of hospital, potentially a mental ward, with how the “windows of her room are barred, and just outside the door is a gate,” not forgetting to mention that even “her bed, [was] nailed to the floor” (526). The treatment of the narrator, who was a seemingly normal woman at the beginning, led her to behavior that could be described as “an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown” (522). This rage builds continuously through the story aimed almost always at

John.
John is the only present male figure in the entire text so the focus of “enforced dependency” placed on the narrator is directed at him, showing the patriarchy set within the home, and in larger terms, the society of the time (Johnson 526). Describing John as enforcing dependency on the narrator gives the idea that the narrator is like a prisoner under his supervision. The previously mentioned researcher Hume does, in fact, describe the narrator as “a prisoner inside the yellow wallpaper,” and continues to explain the imprisonment as “an unsavory social text created and sustained… by men like John” (Hume 480). The power dynamic between the narrator and John is easily comparable to one between the CEO of a company and a part-time employee. John continually attempts to prevent the narrator from freely writing and even moving freely around the house grounds. Yet in John’s attempts he “makes a significant error,” as stated by Johnson. He goes on to illuminate John’s mistake to be when “he underestimates the very imaginative power he is seeking to repress” (524). The narrator’s imaginative power that is being repressed and confined to the room with the entrancing wallpaper is essentially what makes her seem mad.
By the end of the work, the temporary breakdown the narrator had been experiencing is exacerbated to the point where she is “crawling on all fours--as opposed to lying still and docile under her husband’s ‘rest cure,’” which could suggest that the narrator suffers from “not only temporary derangement but also a frantic, insistent growth” that forms her “into a new stage of being” (Johnson 529). The new stage of being that Johnson refers to is synonymous to the narrator releasing the women stuck in the wallpaper. The narrator is essentially a new person when she reaches the climax of her mental break under the treatment of her husband. A new woman free of the unhelpful restraints of physicians. A new woman free of her husband’s control.