Essay On Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Statistically, women are more likely than men to experience depression and psychotic disorders, so mental illness is a familiar subject that brings women together due to their shared vulnerability. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is confined to a nursery in order to cure her hysteria but her further descent into madness liberates her from more than just the room’s appearance. The titular yellow wallpaper is symbolic and deeply connected to the narrator for it relates to her state of mind, her position in society, and her relationships. Gilman’s characterization of the narrator is based on autobiographical experience of hysteria and Neurasthenia, her treatment with S. Weir Mitchell, her marriage and motherhood.
First, the wallpaper is symbolic and connected to, not only, the narrator's state of mind but reflects many aspects of her life especially her position as a woman. As Maria Teresa Gonzalez Minguez says, “For many a woman writer, the associations of house and self seem mainly to have strengthened the anxiety about enclosure which she projected into her art,” (52) in her feminist perspective in “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 'The Yellow Wallpaper': On How Female Creativity Combats Madness And Domestic Oppression.” For example, since the narrator’s room is the nursery, this implies that her depression is related to her child. She is incapable of taking care of her child but she does not necessarily dislike her
Initially in the story, the narrator’s husband and physician diagnoses her with “nervous depression” and “a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 226). In order to treat her, the husband follows the renowned Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure developed in the 1870s. Mitchell treated not only Gilman but, also, Virginia Woolf. The treatment for women, as outlined by Mitchell,