Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Trapped within her own mind, oppressed by a faithful spouse, a victim of malpractice, and stripped of the rights to be a dutiful wife as well as a loving mother, Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a vivid fictional narrative that symbolizes the entrapment and suffering that many women of the nineteenth century lived through. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, creates a narrator who suffers from a mental illness, in a time where clinical psychology, and depression had yet not been explored, nor studied. The narrator’s husband, John, handles her illness terribly. In the narrative “The Yellow Wallpaper” John, as a medical practitioner, as well as a husband, is negligent, controlling, and mentally abuses the narrator.

John constantly dismisses and denies the narrators wishes. The narrator says “When I get really well John says we will invite cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now”(649). The narrator also states that “It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work”(649). John is guilty of isolating his wife, throughout the entire story, she has very little interaction with the outside world, because of John, and the only person she remotely converses with is Jennie, who is also John’s sister and the housekeeper. Adrianne Frech and Kristi Williams proposed that “Compared to men and non depressed women, depressed women are more reliant on close friends and relatives”(152). John also belittles the narrator, and treats her as a child. The narrator says John “Then took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose”(649). Here John is blatantly mocking his wife, as well as displaying a superiority complex because, John knows his word is law. Towards the end of the story, the narrator starts to develop a sense of self, and acknowledges that the treatment she receives from her spouse is queer. The narrator then embraces the seclusion forced upon her by John and personally isolates herself from the family. The narrator starts to see herself within the walls of the room that she is forced to be in, which may be an indication to her progression of insanity, as well as a symbol of the oppression and captivity many women feel within their marriages. Ultimately the narrators reclusiveness caused John to worry about her, and when he tried to enter the room at the end of the story, he found the door locked and he had forcibly enter the room where he gazed upon his wife, and the narrator says that “ I've got out at last," said I,"in