Yellow Wallpaper Breakdown

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a non-fiction short story wrote by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A story narrates how a woman gradually lost her own identity after faced pressures from society and her own husband. The story was published during the nineteen-century and based on the true story of Author’s own struggles with melancholia and her doctor. In Gilman’s own article “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” she said, “I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” Gilman realized the problem was not getting any better, and she saved herself from the edge of a mental breakdown, but conversely the woman in Gilman’s work “The Yellow Wallpaper” was not that lucky.

“My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing” (Gilman 655). “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.” “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 655). In the story, the narrator’s husband and brother are both physicians. They both agreed should giving narrator the “rest treatment” is the best for the temporary depression, but narrator herself knows that is not the best for herself, and even she disagrees there is nothing she can say or do to help avoid the pointless treatment. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she mentions a lot of phrases of “what can one do?” to show women’s helpless during the society at that period of the time. “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind -) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman 655) John’s occupation makes him always practical, thus neglecting his wife’s psychological thoughts. “I sometimes fancy that in my condi-tion if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worse thing I can do is to think about my condition” (Gilman 656). Even when narrator trying to questioning, John will stop her from having her own thoughts, so his wife’s fate was simply submissive under his

The reason for the tragedy is because male dominate society, and the feminist interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes us aware deeply that women need to get true freedom which is freed physically and mentally. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an example of women’s struggles to gain the freedom of voice and power. In the novel, narrator present with the first-person narrative to tell her own experience, and it shows how unimportant women are by not even giving the narrator a name. At the very end of the story, she found herself behind the yellow wallpaper, and “saved” herself from the wall by tearing off all the wallpapers she could. She was a woman with a sense of independent thinking, but she got destroyed by John’s incomprehension and overconfident. Her madness was a desperate revolt after her failure to compromise with the