Yellow Wallpaper Diary

Written in a series of diary entries from the perspective of a woman suffer from postpartum depression, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, opens up with the narrator describing a large, ornate home that she and her husband have rented for the summer. As a practical man, John the husband, is a physician and it was his desire to move out into the country to expose his suffering wife to clean air, and a calmer lifestyle so that she may recover from what he sees as a ‘temporary nervous depression.’
In the diary entries the narrator complains that her husband does not listen to her worries about her condition, and often treats her like a child. In the home she senses something mysterious, and strange. Before they had

moved into the home it had been empty for sometime, John always dismisses her concerns. The purpose of the home was in part John’s desire and part S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘rest-cure.’ The narrator was instructed to dismiss any other activity that is not normal domestic work, so they it may not weigh on her mind. As an avid writer and reader, the narrator secretly writes in her diary.
The former nursery is where they make their room, the walls are peeling yellow wallpaper, and the windows are barred.

The yellow wall paper, for which the story is named, plays a major role. The narrator becomes obsessed with deciphering its illogical, incomprehensible pattern. She writes in her diary that she feels the wallpaper contains a malevolent force that threatens the home. When left alone she studies the wallpaper and begins to imagine seeing a figure within it. Once she realizes this she tries to convince her husband to leave the home, but John feels she is improving and wants to stay. The narrator declines in mental state, the obsession of the wallpaper takes over, she writes in her diary that she believes she is starting to make sense of the pattern; she grows paranoid of her husband and sister Jennie. The top pattern of the wallpaper contains stripes which she believes are bars, and behind the bars she feels there is a trapped woman who creeps whom she is determined to

free.
Becoming unreliable the narrator keeps secrets from her own diary. The day before John and that narrator leave, the narrator attempts to remove the wallpaper. The day of she take the key to the room and locks herself in, she throws the key down into the yard below the window, then she frantically pulls at the wallpaper, wanting to free the woman within. Within the climax of the story the perspective shifts as the narrator has a complete mental breakdown, within her madness she becomes the woman trapped within the wallpaper, in an endless circle she begins to creep around the room. When john breaks into the room and discovers her, he faints. The narrator continues to move in a circle, creeping over the top of his unmoving body.
Gilman uses psychological horror to critique women’s position within the institution of marriage. She distincts the functions of the ‘domestic’ woman, and the ‘active’ work of the male, so that women will remain in second class society. This gender division worked to the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance, and preventing development in mind. The inspiration for the story comes from Gilman’s own life.
Having a difficult childhood Gilman’s father abandoned the family when she was an infant.

When Gilman got married to Charles Walter Gilman, she soon got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. After the birth she developed post-partum depression, she was prescribed by S. Weir Mitchell the unsuccessful ‘rest-cure.’ After divorcing her husband, and moving to Pasadena, California she became an active voice for the feminist movement. She developed breast cancer, and was diagnosed in 1932, she committed suicide in 1935, because she felt it was preferable to death by cancer. Gilman was writing at the beginning of the progressive era in America. This time was for people who expressed their art to contribute to the national conversation about social issues. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was the reason S. Weir Mitchell abandoned the

‘rest-cure.’