The Yellow Wallpaper Postpartum Depression

Michelle Puello
Professor Matthews
English 111-802A.
2 May 2016
Postpartum Depression and How It Affect Marriages “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story that exposed a psychological problem called, postpartum depression. This paper will focus on the negative psychological impact that postpartum depressions have on marriages when both the wife and the husband are not educated about the condition and experienced different and unhelpful treatment for the depression based on the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the story the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression, “Causes by the rapid changes in levels of hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid due to the birth of a child” (Depression
She started to notice that the wallpaper moves at times especially at night, “Woman will experience a break with reality which may include the experience hallucination or delusion. Other symptoms may include severe insomnia, agitation, and bizarre feeling and behavior” (Depression After Delivery Inc. 3). She concluded that the woman trap in the wallpaper is the one that makes it move while she creeps around wanting to get out of it.
The narrator reflects herself with the woman in the wallpaper who was as confined as she also was. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper is the best example in order to understand the self-oppression and oppression by men that women experienced in the late eighteen hundreds. Jeanne Marecek’s article “Disappearance, Silences, and Anxious Rhetoric: Gender in Abnormal Psychology Textbooks” it analyze psychology textbooks and how they ignore
Puello 4 social factors in psychology. Marecek adds that, “The field of abnormal psychology has intrinsically to do with definitions of the good life, ad judgments about proper and improper forms of behavior and social relationship and social relationship” (Marecek 114). Compared with the psychology of the late eighteen hundreds is very different with the one we have today and marriages dynamic changes as
Valerie Raskin said in their book “This Isn’t What I expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression” (Bantam 1994), “…Women are rarely informed about the range of emotions that can develop after the birth of their baby. When they experience difficulty, they are often silenced by well-intentioned healthcare providers or family members: “All mothers experience this,” or “find a hobby.” This advice doesn’t work. In

Puello 5 fact, it can make her feel worse, misunderstood and isolated” (Karen Kleiman and Valerie Raskin “This Isn’t What I expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression” 1994). Based on this research it is easier to understand how the narrator feels with her condition, when all the people around her took her for granted and based of the lack of knowledge about postpartum depression in the late eighteen hundreds the antidote used to treated her just made her worse. Finally, The negative psychological impact that postpartum depressions have on marriages when both the wife and the husband are not educated about the condition and experienced different and unhelpful treatment for the depression is very unhealthy for the relationship and both husband and wife as an example in “The Yellow Wallpaper” if are not educated about it can lead worsen the