The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her personal experiences with depression and with the rest cure to create “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman hated the limitations women had during that period and wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to rebel against society and give women a voice.
The narrator’s diagnoses and treatment were very common for that period. The narrator throughout this whole story was going through a treatment called “the rest cure”. Now the rest cure was only use for women, it was a used to “treat” them for their hysteria or other mental illnesses. Back in those days, they believe that it was the women’s duty to stay home and cook, clean, manage the house, have children and then raise those children. They believed that women shouldn’t write,
He fails to see her mental instability for what they truly are and his actions to place her on the rest cure only make things worse. The narrator even questions the treatment prescribed to her by her husband and brother, saying "Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good". However, even though she questions her treatment she is powerless to change it. Gilman uses this to show what little power women to men of this era.
The narrator being forbidden by her husband to have an imagination leaves her with built up oppressed feelings. So, she imagines things in the yellow wallpaper, developing a sort of relationship with the wallpaper and express suppressed feelings to it. The isolation in her bedroom only makes things
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide— plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions". The wallpaper symbolizes her life and how it is dull and boring that it might lead her it commits suicide. Later, it is described as “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream”. The pattern in the wallpaper representing the narrator’s mindset and how this “rest cure” is making her