Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper

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To write a successful short story authors are first faced with the challenge of finding a suitable topic or reason for their writing. Short stories are often composed of a genre of some sort, conflict, symbols, and a moral or motif that the author is trying to get across. There are many ways authors may be inspired to compose their writing. Various authors have been noted to base their writing on past experiences that occurred in their lives or in a loved one’s. Some have found ideas through current social events in time, or lessons through their religious beliefs and values. An author may also write about a situation that has traumatized them in the past. For trauma, causes people to become obsessed and often relive whatever the horrid memory …show more content…
This experience is believed to have inspired her best-known short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (Knight, 15). Gilman expresses her story as a cry for help during a horrible time in her life. Her story is that of a perspective of a woman’s plunge into pure madness and craziness based on her own experience of years of a problematic marriage and then her resulting mental breakdown. Gilman relates her story to her fictional writing when she even includes the name of her real life doctor, Weir Mitchell, in her work as well when she writes how John, threatens her that he will send her back to him if she doesn’t “pick up faster”(Gilman, 1101). Gilman relives her traumatic breakdown through her writing when she illustrates the room that John, a character for her real husband, locks her up in. She describes the room as “dull”, “irritating”, and with “unheard of contradictions”. Gilman portrays an obsession with the wallpaper as she writes “the color is repellent, almost revolting, a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight”(Gilman, 1102). By going on intensifying the characters hatred for this room she emphasizes the reason for her breakdown and the obvious problems with the bed-rest cure. Gilman writes about the character reaching her peak of insanity as she looks through
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