Feminism In The Yellow Wallpaper

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman confronts readers with the issues women of the 1800’s faced, such as, feminism and mental health that were not often talked about. “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes the reader on a journey of a nameless, mentally ill woman, who writes a series of journal entries when prescribed a “rest cure” by her doctor/husband. It is hard for today’s readers to understand what the narrator is going though, but for Gilman, this was reality. “The Yellow Wallpaper” stems from Gilman’s strong belief in feminism, her understanding of what it is like to live in a male dominate society, and her own experiences, very similar to the woman in her short story experiences. Each of these aspects make are what make “The Yellow …show more content…
Both, Gilman and the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” were prescribed a “rest cure”, which is keeping one isolated with as little stimulation as possible. Through the rest cure treatment the misogynistic views of the men during the 1800’s were clearly shown and the readers are also able to see how women found some way to prevail and go against what society believed they should be doing. Gilman expresses this in “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” by saying, “I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous disease, the best known in the country…he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home to live as domestic a life as far as possible” (Gilman 1). Gilman is expressing that even when she truly believed that there was something wrong with her even the best doctor in the world didn’t see anything wrong with her. Jane F. Tharilkill agrees with the logic that male doctors did not want to believe any advice given and that they did not know how to treat female patients. While Tharilkill examines “The Yellow Wallpaper” historically she explains that, “hysteria is a strange disease with incoherent and incomprensible symptoms… Hysterical behavior was, in other words, both fickle and threatening” (Rharilkill 545-546). Since the mental diagnosis was hard to spot, male doctors could have used the rest cure to get rid of a scary, unfamiliar problem, which resulted is more harm than good. Gilman explains that the rest cure included having “but two hours’ intellectual life a day and ever touch a pen, brush, or pencil again as long as I lived” (Gilman 1). This is enough to drive someone crazy, instead Gilman used this time to rebel by
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