Where Madness Meets Creativity In The Yellow Wallpaper

Where Madness Meets Creativity
It is said that artists and writers are similar in the fact that they are connected by madness and creativity. In this short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, an isolated woman confined by the influence of her husband not only physically, but mentally, writes about her personal experiences while dealing with the effects of a developing mental illness. The woman is seemingly “mad” but also creative as she expresses her thoughts through the only outlet she has, writing. She writes from her perspective of the world and the things around her from inside her room. This story reveals the gender division between John and the narrator and the effects of keeping her in a childish state of ignorance to prevent her full development. In this time period, men were superior to women; therefore, women had to obey a man’s authority. The dominant male hierarchy leads to the relations between
The narrator’s husband influences her to believe she is sicker than she truly is. John is a physician and the narrator has to respect his opinion and superiority over her own. Suppression slowly leads to depletion of her mental state. Therefore, the narrator sees her illness as more of a nervous or anxiety disorder rather than being oblivious to the fact that it is a provoked mental ailment. The narrator refers to her illness as a “nervous condition” and writes that certain events or objects make her anxious. The narrator’s restricted conditions make madness arise from her inability to be creative and express her thoughts. Therefore, she secretly writes them down in a journal hiding them from John. While being restricted to only one room in the house the narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room. She slowly slips into madness staring at the wallpaper throughout the day and at night and begins to imagine things in the paper like eyes, heads, and even a woman shaking the