Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an early work of feminism and mental illness awareness. Through the eyes of the narrator, we learn that she is struggling to get better after her husband John, a physician, offers ‘rest cure’ as a treatment for her depression (Brown 51). She soon becomes fixated with the imaginary woman that lurks within the yellow wallpaper. As the story goes on, the narrator progressively becomes more insane. This is shown as her only concern is the creeping woman in the wallpaper and how to catch her. As a result, we soon realize that the woman creeping in the wallpaper are parallel to the protagonist herself, both are trapped, “creeping” to get out and longing to be free. This essay
Brown speaks about the negative side effects of ‘rest cure’ and how bad treatment can lead to insanity. While ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ has a huge feminist undertone, the story is more centered around mental health. The major evidence is shown by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, the essay where she explains how her own personal experience with the treatment of ‘rest cure’, and how it created her story. She had tried the ‘rest cure’ for three months, only to be near mental wreckage. Her experience so devastating she had to create “The Yellow Wallpaper” to describe the horror she went through. She wrote the story to save lives of people who may be endangered of ‘rest cure’. Although readers can see that John is very uncaring of the narrator, in the story there is no evidence to show that the narrator hated her husband. Even after losing her mind, she still spoke to John with a lot of affection. John may be ignorant but John was not intentionally driving her crazy, but it was lack of research in depression/mental disorders. Accordingly, this lead to lack of treatment, and that is what drove her