The Yellow Wallpaper Rhetorical Analysis Essay

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a short story by Charlotte Gilman, the author uses various archetypal devices throughout the story, including the damsel in distress, and the fall to showing a woman going through a terrible condition while being shrugged off as not serious; directly mirroring society not taking a woman’s word compared to their fellow man or revealing how easily misconceived mental illness really is. Several times throughout the story, the narrator provides us with her account of the condition she constantly goes through that nobody believes is real. Making the narrator a damsel in distress within her own mind with no hero to save her; Gilman writes this to reveal how many in society, especially during her time, viewed mental illness as something easily treatable and hardly something to worry
Now one could easily argue that perhaps Gilman didn’t give the rest cure enough time and that she should’ve allowed things to worsen in order to get better. The argument doesn’t hold up however when told by Gilman herself in the same article “I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came to borderline of utter mental ruin…” (Paragraph 4). When near finishing Gilman’s short story however, it becomes increasingly clear the archetypal storyline “the fall” is introduced as a commentary on the view on woman as a whole in Gilman’s society. The narrator goes from a typical wife moving into a new house with her husband. Wondering about her condition the entire time, she constantly asks John if he’d take another look at her since the narrator knows what she’s going through is real; however John snaps on the narrator saying "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind...Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?" (Page 6). John talks down to her, as if her opinion or word on her own mental state is neither valid nor even worth