The Yellow Wallpaper Cure Essay

The Cure
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” a woman is trapped in a colonial mansion where she cannot do anything on her own. She is forced to sit and do nothing. She is not allowed to interact with the outside world or even write, because it is considered to be too much for her and the cause of her nervousness. As this so called resting treatment continues she slowly begins to lose her mind. The author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uses rhetoric throughout her story. However, she really focuses on symbolism. For instance the wallpaper itself is the main symbol throughout the story. The wallpaper starts out so sad and unappealing in the beginning of the story, it was one of those “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” it had been “stripped off” the walls in “great patches” (Gilman, 781). As the story continues the wallpaper gains more character that makes it less tasteless and more appealing to the main character. She begins to see a woman in the wallpaper and it seems as if the woman is trying to tell her something. She begins to sympathize with the woman trapped in the
paper just as she wants you to do with her, this is her use of pathos. She wants sympathy from her audience because maybe it will bring them into realizing they’re just like the woman trapped in the wallpaper. Gilman’s reasoning for writing this story was to get attention for the “resting cure” and bring light to women’s oppression.
She wanted people to see that the resting cure which was highly praised does not work. In fact it drives the ill quite insane being kept from the outside world and not being able to have a purpose other than to lay in bed all day. During this time period women really had no say over anything not even themselves. When the narrator of the story suggests to her husband her ideas of what is happening to her he just laughs at her for it. This is because when a woman would express her observations to a man it was taken as “an indication of her self-conceit” (Thrailkill, 526). Gilman wanted to get people questioning this rest cure and questioning gender roles and why women had no say over themselves and looked at as incompetent
fools. In the late nineteenth century women had no other role in society other than to basically be slaves to their husbands and birth children. Women were confined to a small world that men ruled with no sympathy. Men believed that women were incapable of understanding medical and that every illness that they came down with was nothing more than their nervousness or hysteria. In fact the whole idea of the resting cure for women is to cut off any outside world keeping them from “the possibility of over-stimulating conversations” (Treichler, 61). Keep in mind at this time only men are doctors and her doctor also happens to be her husband. This suggests that even as a wife a woman serves no other purpose to a man than sex and chores. This silence she is forced to part take in does not allow her to “express negative thoughts” which added to being in a “room in an isolated country estate, will not cure her” (Treichler,61).
Gilman was ahead of her time when she wrote this short story about questioning oppression and the view if women in the early nineteenth century. This piece was a breakthrough full of symbolism of the everyday life of a depressed young mother and wife in this time period. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Bedford, 1998. Print.
Thrailkill, Jane F. “Doctoring "the Yellow Wallpaper"”. ELH 69.2 (2002): 525–566.
Web. 3 Feb.2016.
Treichler, Paula A.. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "the Yellow
Wallpaper"”.61–77. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.