The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Immoral Heteronomy as a Causation of Mental Illness Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent writer and feminist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Raised predominantly by her single mother and aunts, Gilman received an unconventional education that was never fully completed, but was able to attend university with the financial aid of her estranged father. An exceptionally bright child, Gilman lived in a time period that did not offered her the autonomy of her own life that she desired. As Virginia Woolf notoriously said, women writers are a product of their time, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is no exception. The separation of women from their bodies, minds, and individuality in the late 19th century were exemplified by the qualities
After giving birth to her only child, Gilman fell ill to a severe bout of depression when faced the societal constructions of motherhood, but was instead diagnosed with hysteria. Diagnosed to a myriad of women feeling a wide variety of symptoms, such pain, fatigue, emotional instability, changes in sexual drive, and other vague dispositions, hysteria was scientifically and societally accepted as a disease. The treatment for which, known as the victorian rest cure, was a hellacious regiment meant to break a woman down mentally and physically, allegedly alleviating patients of the undesirable symptoms that ailed them. Gilman’s own experiences going through this treatment served as the inspiration for the narrator’s relationship with her doctor, John. “But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self control” (pg. 1393), Gilman sharply pivots her tone the beginning of the story, breaking the narrator’s personal train of thought, “if I feel so,” by sharply interjecting a man’s point of view into the piece. As I read the beginning of the text, I noticed how I continued to be drawn into the narrator’s train of thought as she contemplated her ailing disposition and potential treatments, only to be contradicted by a harsh “but John,” snapping the narrative back to a patriarchal reality, preaching ideals like “self
All the while neglecting the treatment many women truly needed, keeping them in a dependent place. “Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now” (pg. 1395), the narrator says of her sister-in-law and housekeeper, embodying the rest cure’s prescriptions for isolation and bedrest. Throughout the story she references how she must hide her writing from John and Jennie, which I take to be her true feelings she holds back and hides away because of the societal implications of being a women in the late 19th century. Also illustrated by the passage “He does not believe that I am sick,” (pg. 1392), the preposterous medical practice further minimized the agency of women who did not have a voice as to how they felt, and were instead told how they felt. Suffering from mental illness is an isolating experience in itself, so when compounded with an isolationist medical and psychological treatment, I cannot imagine the added suffering and self-questioning someone like the narrator or Gilman herself were forced