The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper, “Explanations of Insanity.”

"The Yellow Wallpaper", written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story of a woman, her psychological difficulties and her husband's so called therapeutic treatment of her aliments during the late 1800s. Gilman, who writes from her own personal experiences, is suffering from a “temporary depression.” She is having to face the overwhelming fact that this is a male dominated society and sometimes women suffer because of it. Gilman sets up the story to convey a certain opinion of the repercussions a woman faces in the care of a man. She states right from the beginning that "John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-- perhaps that is the one reason I do not get well faster." (McMichael, George, “The Yellow Wallpaper” page 667.) The story mentions that she has an older brother who is also a physician and concurs with her husbands theory, thus leaving her no choice but to subject herself to this torment of being totally alone in this room with the yellow wallpaper.

The narrator with absolutely nothing else to do is reduced to staring endlessly at a pattern in a wallpaper, thus creating some image that she feels is necessary to find out. Perhaps to save her own sanity? Once the narrator determines that the image is in fact a woman struggling to become free, she somehow aligns herself with the woman. She continues to pursue this obsessive project of getting the woman out. Gilman is obviously putting her dilemmas along with the women stuck in the wallpaper into the same category. That would be the thought and feeling of being “trapped!” The narrator wants the women to be free of the paper just as bad as she wants to be looked at as a sane person as well as being allowed to read and write again without being scolded by her mentally and vocally abusive, overpowering husband...