FREE ESSAY ON "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER":

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER":

For the women in the twentieth century today, who have more freedom than before and have
not experienced the depressive life that Gilman lived from 1860 to 1935, it is difficult
to understand Gilman's situation and understand the significance of "The Yellow
Wallpaper". Gilman's original purpose of writing the story was to gain personal
satisfaction if Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might change his treatment after reading the story.
However, as Ann L. Jane suggests, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is "the best crafted of her
fiction: a genuine literary piece...the most directly, obviously, self-consciously
autobiographical of all her stories" (Introduction xvi). And more importantly, Gilman
says in her article in The Forerunner, "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to
save people from being driven crazy, and it worked" (20). Therefore, "The Yellow
Wallpaper" is a revelation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's own emotions.
When the story first came out in 1892 the critics considered "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a
portrayal of female insanity rather than a story that reveals an aspect of society. In
The Transcript, a physician from Boston wrote, "Such a story ought not to be written...it
was enough to drive anyone mad to read it" (Gilman 19). This statement implies that any
woman that would write something to show opposition to the dominant social values must
have been insane. In Gilman's time setting "The ideal woman was not only assigned a
social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be
cheerful and gay, smiling and good humored" (Lane, To Herland 109). Those women who
rejected this role and pursued intellectual enlightenment and freedom would be scoffed,
alienated, and even punished. This is exactly what Gilman experienced when she tried to
express her desire for independence. Gilman expressed her emotional and psychological
feelings of rejection from society for thinking freely in "The Yellow Wallpaper", which
is a reaction to the fact that it was against the grain of society for women to pursue
intellectual freedom or a career in the late 1800's. Her taking Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's
"rest cure" was the result of the pressures of these prevalent social values.
Charlotte Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut in a family boasting
a list of revolutionary thinkers, writers. And intermarriages among them were, as Carol
Berkin put it, "in discrete confirmation of their pride in association" (18). One fact
that catches our attention is that, either from the inbreeding, or from the high
intellectual capacity of the family, there was a long sting of disorders ranging from
"manic-depressive illness" to nervous breakdowns including suicide and short term
hospitalizations (Lane, To Herland 110). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman's aunt, also
complained about this illness. When writing to a friend, Beecher said, "My mind is
exhausted and seems to be sinking into deadness" (Lane, TO Herland 111). She felt this
way for years and did not recover from so many breakdowns until finding "real release in
her writing" of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Lane, To Herland 111). And Catherine Beecher, another
famous writer and lecturer at that time, was also sent to the same sanitarium for nervous
disorders. As Gilman came from a family of such well known feminists and revolutionaries,
it is without a doubt that she grew up with the idea that she had the right to be treated
as anyone, whether man or woman.
Not only did this strong background affect her viewpoint about things, it also affected
her relations with her husband and what role she would play in that relationship. From
the beginning of her marriage, she struggled with the idea of conforming to the domestic
model for women. Upon repeated proposals from Stetson, her husband, Gilman tried to "lay
bare her torments and reservations" about getting married (Lane, To Herland 85). She
claimed that "her thoughts, her acts, her whole life would be centered on husband and
children. To do the work she needed to do, she must be free" (Lane, To Herland 85).
Gilman was so scared of this idea because she loved her work and she loved freedom,
though she also loved her husband very much. "After a long period of uncertainty and
vacillation" she married Charles Stetson at 24 (Lane, Introduction x). Less than a year
later, however, "feelings of 'nervous exhaustion' immediately descended upon Gilman, and
she became a 'mental wreck'" (Ceplair 17). In that period of time, she wrote many
articles on "women caught between families and careers and the need for women to have
work as well as love" (Ceplair 19).
The stress that Gilman was under of rejecting the "domestic model" of women led to her
breakdown and caused her to meet Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. She attempted to express the
tensions she felt her work, her husband, and her child in her writing. She did her best
to fight against the depression but finally "she collapsed utterly in April 1886"
(Ceplair 19), forcing her to turn to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a nationally renowned
neurologist in women's nervous diseases. He told Gilman that "she was suffering from
neurasthenia, or exhaustion of the nerves" the diagnosis required his renowned "rest
cure" (Lane, To Herland 115). The treatment required for the cure involved "1) extended
and total bed rest; 2) isolation from family and familiar surroundings..." (Lane, To
Herland 116). The treatment was basically a version of how to be submissive and domestic
according to the dominant social values outside of the sanitarium. After being treated
for a month Gilman was sent home and was told to "live as domestic a life as
possible...and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live" (Lane, To Herland
121). Having a strong love for her work and being a free thinker and writer, Gilman would
naturally consider this way of treatment a cruel punishment. In her diary she wrote, "I
went home, followed those directions rigidly for a month and came perilously near to
losing my mind" (Lane, To Herland 121).
In the late 1800's women did not have the opportunity to have both a career and their
families. They have to give up their families if they waned to pursue a career. Despite
the great controversy she created, Gilman decided to choose her work over her family when
she divorced her husband in 1887 and moved to California. A few years later, she gave her
child to her ex-husband in order to lecture across the country. In 1890 she wrote "The
Yellow Wallpaper" in reaction to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's "rest cure". In her "Why I wrote
'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" in The Forerunner, Gilman portrays the "years I suffered from a
severe and continuous nervous breakdown" and goes on to talk about the doctor who treated
her and how in reaction to treatment had "sent a copy to the physician who so nearly
drove me mad" (Gilman 19, 20). And she says, "the best result...years later I was told
the treat specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of
neurasthenia since reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (Gilman 20).
Despite what Gilman said, we can sense a tone of this work being close to her emotional
and psychological reality. Besides, many studies have been carried out to find what
Gilman's intent was in writing "The Yellow Wallpaper". Joanne Karpinski says, "one theme
that seems to run through all her works...is a desire for order and coherence in lived
experience" (3) while Lane suggests, "(it) is an intensely personal examination of
Gilman's private nightmare" (To Herland 127). This implies that she wrote this story to
sort through her emotions and fears in her own life. If her revenge for Dr. Mitchell is
part of the reason in writing this work, it is also true that her creation of this story
allows her to reveal her emotional and psychological state of mind.
Even though "The Yellow Wallpaper" is just a story that is most probably fictitious,
there are amazing similarities between Gilman's real life experience and what is depicted
in the story. Lane describes one of Gilman's diary entry where she wrote, "I made a rag
baby...hung it on the doorknob and played with it. I would crawl into remote closets and
under beds --- to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress" (To Herland
121). This is amazingly similar to what is described of the narrator in the story, who
crawls and creeps in the corners of the room. Gilman showed her emotions in the story and
tried to discover "what happens to our lives if we let others run them for us" (Lane,
introduction xviii). The attempts to discover was hard for her "(it) must have haunted
Gilman all her life because it answered the question: what if she had not fled her
husband and renounced the most advance psychiatric advice of her time?" (Lane,
Introduction xviii).
"The Yellow wallpaper" is a testament to Gilman's own life experience. We can feel the
tough decisions she made and how those decisions affected her emotionally as Lane puts
it, "perhaps the emotional truth and intensity of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' drained her;
perhaps it frightened her" (To Herland 127). Gilman delved deep into her emotions and
feelings in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and that is why it is Gilman's best-know work today
(Charters 318).
Bibliography
Bibliography
Berkin, Ruth Carol. "Self-Images: Childhood and Adolescence." Critical Essays on
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Joanne Karpinski. New York: G.K. Hall,
1992. 
Ceplair, Larry. "The Early Years." Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-fiction Reader. Ed.
Larry Ceplair. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 5-19. 
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (Compact Fifth
Edition). Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, 1999
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" The Forerunner (Oct.
1913): 19-20. 
Karpinski, Joanne B. Introduction. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed.
Joanne Karpinski. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992. 
Lane, Ann J. Introduction. "The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." The
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Ed. Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980. X-xviii. 
Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York:
Penguin, 1990.