Jennifer Hilpert

Dr. Douglas Rowlett

English 2328
20 June 2008
Exam 1
Charlotte Perkins Gilmans experience with post-partum depression is the
inspiration for her story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman was an American feminist and a
writer. She was most known for her book Women and Economics, in which she
denounces womens financial dependence on men and supports day-care programs
and cooperative kitchens. Gilman continues to support such feminist themes in The
Yellow Wallpaper.
One main theme in The Yellow Wallpaper is the role of women in nineteenthcentury American society. At that time values stressed that women were to behave
demurely and be domestic in all aspects. The birth of a child was supposed to be the
culmination of all that was considered to be womanly, the best and happiest time of a
womans life. It was most certainly not a time for depression of any kind. The story
manages to address another theme, mental illness. Psychologists frequently dismissed
serious illnesses like post-partum depression as nothing more than case of the nerves.
They advised their patients get complete bed rest, believing that intellectual activity was
detrimental to womens mental health. This comes back to the role of women. Suffering
from postpartum depression after the birth of her son, the narrator is advised by her
husband, a physician, to get complete bed rest. Her husband wouldnt even allow her
to read or write for the fear of it becoming taxing on her small female mind. He often

treats her like a child, calling her his little girl and his blessed little goose. When the
narrator has a real earnest reasonable talk with John during which she asks him if she
can visit some relatives, he does not even allow her to go. It is oblivious that John did
not believe that the narrator should have any say in what she did, and why should she,
she was just a mere female.
Because the narrator has nothing to do to occupy herself she projects all of her
pent up feelings onto the yellow wallpaper in her room. Eventually she believes that
there is a woman trapped in the wallpapers pattern. This trapped figure symbolizes the
narrators emotional and intellectual confinement. Left with no real means of expression
or escape, the narrator represses her anger and frustration and succumbs to insanity.
The yellow wallpaper becomes the most important symbol in the story. It reflects the
narrators state of mind, and symbolizes the way women were viewed in nineteenthcentury society. The wallpaper is described as containing pointless patterns, lame
uncertain curves and outrageous angles that destroy themselves in unheard of
contradictions. These descriptions are also reflective of the way the men in the
narrators life saw her and her situation.
Besides the obvious yellow wallpaper, a more subtle, but perhaps an even more
supportive symbolic element to the theme of the role of women, is the nursery. Society
tended to view women as children, and the fact that John had her stay in a room that
once served as a nursery, then later as a childrens gym, only supports how he treated
her as a child. There were bars on the windows because of the children. Those bars
were the emotional, social, and intellectual prison in which the John kept the narrator.

There is a lot of question as to why Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. For
many years she suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to
melancholia--and beyond. She was told by a noted specialist in nervous diseases, to be
put to bed and apply the rest cure. So home she went and applied his 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. She tired for three years, at the end of
which she was near utter mental ruin. She stopped following the advice in about as
opposite of direction as you can take it, and ultimately recovered. In the end she was
so rejoiced that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. I think the meaning of this story was
to raise the awareness of mental illness in women, and to show that the rest cure was,
in fact, not the cure to everything after all.
While it is a hard call to make, the story is primarily naturalistic. The themes in
The Yellow Wallpaper are very naturalistic. It is in a womans nature to take care of their
child, thats why is was so easy for John to believe that just a little rest was all that the
narrator needed, just give it a little time because it all should just come natural. This
shows that the story relied on some naturalistic principles. What made it a hard call to
make is that the narrator totally went against nature. It must be taken into account that
the narrators behavior is a rarity and in the society at that time believed it as such. So
while the behaviors of the narrator were existential, the beliefs and views of the story
were naturalistic.