A Feminist Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" – A Feminist Analysis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is a psychosomatic survey of her condition written by a nervous, paternalistically-suppressed young woman, during a three-month period of her treatment of neurasthenia. It is a document of the contemplations of her external environment and the physiological variations occurring within her, a sketch of the function of her mind-frame, within a tensed and depressed brain, when her system of thought is limited to the scope of settings provided by people other than herself. Charlotte was suffering from psychological disease neurasthenia, characterized by nervousness and mental tension, when a well-known physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, advised her a mind-rest cure. This meant that the doctor wanted Charlotte to give a rest to her disturbed mind, aimed at refreshing her brain. The young lady, being creative and have an artistic mind-set, however, found the
pattern for cure suffocating for her persona. She felt she was being denied the degree of freedom to think and to write, two things which would speak of her ideals, sensibilities and tastes, and which would carry images of her persona from her thoughts to scribbles on a piece of paper.
This meant that these images were restricted within a perplexed mind, and external images of objects linked with them to produce confounded images of her surroundings.
These self-propelled illusions were stimulated, to a large extent, by the literary foundation on which her brain was working, mixed by anxiety and suppression of ideas. Charlotte liked to imagine things and one might be able to do restrict the mode of communication of one’s perceptions but they are not able to prevent the expressions that speak out one way or the other. Instead of easing the nervousness and anxiety that had caused the problem, the scheme of treatment enforced on Charlotte clashed with her personality. She was more of an independent sort of a person where the idea of concealing one’s worries under the pretext of easing mental stress deceives natural evolution of ideas. The consequence, as we see in this account, is a severe alteration of the mental disorder, marked by disfiguration in metamorphic sense of
objects.
Her husband, a physician himself, sees only her illness in terms of signs and symptoms and fails to recognize the quintessence of Charlotte’s problems. The kind of materialistic environment he provides her for her treatment actually works against her sense of things. She wants to get into more ‘feminine’ environs, described by bouquets of flowers than hard, polished wooden doors. Charlotte loves her husband, so much so, that she feels in debt to him when she feels that she is unable to be his companion over his course. This kind of feeling drives her unable to face her husband upfront and perpetuates an emotional distance between the two. John, her husband, continues to make her do whatever he feels is medically feasible for her wife, while she gets more and more wary of the suffocation of things surrounding her. She feels that she has been imprisoned into some strange array of complex materials, in which things move in strange patterns, and comes to believe herself a woman stuck behind intricate dimensions of wallpaper. She feels stuck; she wants to move out, but the only time