Insanity In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story written in the first person about a young woman who goes insane while dealing with postpartum depression in the late eighteen hundreds. Gilman's use of the first person is helpful to the reader so that they can better understand the journey to insanity through the eyes of the narrator. Guy de Massupant once said “A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption” which fits this short story well with the woman's constant obsession over the wallpaper in her room. In this story, the use of the first-person narrative is important because it helps the reader join the narrator's journey into insanity. The story takes place in the late eighteen hundreds where people weren’t as educated on depression and the effects of having poor mental health, which gives the narrator a disadvantage at getting better. The narrator's husband is a doctor who is treating her for postpartum depression and from her point of view, it’s apparent that not much is being done to treat it other than sleep, isolation,
While using first person we get to see how the woman's mind changes at each journal entry she writes, how she gets continuously worse as time progresses. The woman lets the reader know when she notices how her husband begins to realize that his wife isn’t getting better and is, in fact, getting worse. We can tell this by the way she points out how he begins to ask personal questions of the narrators caretaker and how he has a weird look in his eye. We can see how the narrator begins to question her husband's affection towards her and her health and how she starts to believe he's only pretending to care. Through other points of view, it wouldn't have been as