Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published in 1892. The narrator of the short story is a woman that is being treated in a summer, colonial home for her “nervous depression” by her doctor husband. The narrator’s husband locks her away in the attic to be entirely sequestered from any artistic or intellectual activities that would impede her cure process. This short story was written to battle with the ways of treatment that these so-called doctors would use to treat depression in women, such as the rest cure. Silas Weir Mitchell created the rest cure to treat hysteria, neurasthenia, and other nervous illnesses. It usually lasted six to eight weeks and involved complete isolation from friends and family. Enforcing …show more content…
The writer, Gilman, was never truly a part of society and repressed her feelings. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper¬ did not want to accept her feelings and thoughts so she projected them onto the woman in the wallpaper until the narrator could not handle it any longer. Gul states that an illness is “the consequence of not being loved and being unable to love.” I do not agree with that statement because an illness can be caused by an actual imbalance within someone’s brain. She also states that since Gilman’s voice is strategically placed in the narrator’s, you can see these elements coming from Gilman’s unhappy childhood and her struggle to fully find herself. Gul takes two different opinions about the end of the short story and turns it into what does it subconsciously mean. One opinion being that when the narrator strangles the woman, nothing can be suppressed anymore; the other opinion would be from Knight, stating that the narrator’s use of her name as third person shows a subconscious resentment of her role as a mother and a