Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of oppression and tragedy, revolving around the protagonists’ mental state, which is worsened by her husband’s domination of every aspect of her life.
In the 1800’s, life was very different for women than it is today. Women were always controlled by a male relative in life, be it their father or brothers, then their husbands, and had no property of their own. When a woman was married, she and her husband became one entity, where her husband controlled all of her daily life. Marriage vows of the time gave everything a woman produced to her husband; children, sex, and domestic labor. Divorce was taboo, so most women put up with their husbands’ infidelity and abuse to have a

She was a bookish girl who enjoyed what is now known as physics but was a poor student. She stopped her schooling at the age of fifteen and became a painter, before attending the Rhode Island school of design where she supported herself by making business cards. In 1884 she married her first husband and had one daughter. Her daughters’ birth caused her to have a serious bout of post-partum depression, and this illness became her inspiration for writing The Yellow Wallpaper. She divorced her first husband and moved west, before marrying her first cousin in 1900. She was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer in 1932 and committed suicide by overdosing on chloroform. Her suicide note stated that she “chose chloroform over cancer” as she was a staunch supporter of assisted suicide for the terminally

The stereotypical male is portrayed as seeing women as dim-witted children. This is made clear when the protagonist says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression- - slight hysterical tendency- - what is one to do?” (Gilman). Gilman shows the male perspective through dialogue because the Protagonist explains that no matter what she might vocalize, John shrugs her concerns away. He, like most males of the time, sees a weak woman and thinks nothing more of it, giving her the “rest cure”, adding more stress to a women’s mental illness. John makes her a conformist by enforcing society’s beliefs on her. The protagonist also falls victim to oppression through derogatory names on behalf of John, shown when he interacts with the protagonist, “Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it Whitewashed into the bargain” (Gilman). Calling her a little goose, John shows how much intelligence he thinks his wife has. Gilman weaves a masterful example of how women are dominated by their husbands in the late Victorian Era. Martha J. Cutter in her article "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction" discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's