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Cynthia Welman
rd June 00
"The Yellow Wallpaper" A theme of Inequality.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the theme of
social inequality for women, is further developed when the main character slowly goes
from post partum depression to severe manic depression, directly resulting from the
treatment prescribed by her husband physician.
At the time the story was written Ms.Gilman had herself recovered from a
depression despite the advice from a well noted physician, as she notes in her response to
critics in her article entitled, Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, which appeared in
the October issue of the Forerunner. (Gilman 1) "For many years I suffered from a severe
and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about
the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted
specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to
bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that
he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn
advice to live as domestic a life as far as possible, to have but two hours intellectual
life a day, and never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again as long as I lived. This was in
1887. "
In the year of 1887 women were thought of as the weaker sex, their life was
limited to domestic duties, cooking cleaning and caring for children. Intellectual
activities such as writing were thought to be to hard on a woman. These ideas, mean that
women were confined to the home, unable to seek education, obtain jobs and control
money. For those women who husbands were able to afford housekeepers, whether the
wives wanted them or not, quite often even domestic chores where taken away. As we
see throughout the story, told in a first person account, the narrator has no name, she has
no identity except that of a sick woman who is being cared for by her physician husband.
We know she has a child, but the child is cared for by a servant, Mary. We know that all
other domestic duties are taken care of by her husbands sister, Jeannie, who is by the
narrator own words " [a] perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better
profession" (Gillman).
Lacking any stimulation at all, because her writing is forbidden, she has nothing
to do but rest, all stimulation is banned. Despite her own ideas, that some intellectual
stimulus is needed to make her feel better she follows the advice of her physician
husband. Advice that was common for the treatment of depression at the time,
especially for women included complete bed rest, cessation of domestic chores and no
writing. The debate still continues as to whether or not the male physician was really
trying to cure his female patient or harass her with a "bed rest cure" ( Rosenburg and
Rosenburg).
As "The Yellow Wallpaper"progresses we see that the narrator tells her physician
husband, John, she doesn't like the room to which they share. A large room with plenty
of windows, each with bars on them, the room is scarcely furnished, the wall paper a
sickly yellow, in her own terms. Each time she remarks on the wallpaper she hears her
husband laughs and remind her being in the room is for her own good. As a wife she has
no say in her own bedroom, as a patient she has no say in her recovery. It is no wonder
then that her depression takes hold and deepens. Unable to be creative in her own way
her mind struggles to define what is happening to her any way it can, and it does so in her
imaginings with the yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is already rich with design, is a
source to magnify her feelings of being trapped in her life. Soon they have only three
weeks left in the home and she is unable to communicate with her husband her fears of
being behind bars, because he was the very person who placed her behind those bars. As
noted by Michael Mahin the theme is a "women as a prisoner". As her husband he fails
to see how miserable his wife has become, as a physician he holds to his treatment and
chooses to ignore the fact that she is not getting better.
It is within these boundaries that the story takes on social reference, inequality is
apparent for women. Unable to be the person she wants to be, a writer, mother and
wife, due to the influence of her husband she loses her mind to insanity. Everything she
does becomes associated with the paper, smells form the paper emanate throughout the
house, such as her husband has control of her entire life. Afraid to sleep with him at
night she sleeps during the day and watches the paper at night. During one of those
nights it dawns on her a way to escape the hold her husband has on her life, by removing
the wallpaper from the wall. In doing so she releases the woman, herself behind the bars,
stuck at night. As the day to leave gets closer, she works harder to remove the paper
from the wall, to release the prisoner. Eventually, her husband to comes home, to finish
the move and she has locked him out of the room, out of her life. A life that she now
controls, however mad it might be. But she cannot finish what she started, she cannot
completely remove all the wallpaper, it is to high to reach. She no longer wants to
leave the room it has become her safe place, she cannot look out the windows, because
she sees the creeping women. And wonders "[i]f they all come out of that wall-paper as I
did?" She has tied herself to the bed so she cannot be removed form the room. Her
plunge into madness is complete when her husband finds her crawling on the floor tied to
the bedstead, he faints and she creeps over him.
It is through this story that we can begin to understand the inequality women have
faced. Bound to play by societies strict rules of marriage and domestic duties, women
were left with nothing when they stepped out of the confines of that social structure.
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