Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are many events that can foreshadow the rest of one’s life for the better, or, for the worst. In Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane (the narrator) struggles with a mental illness that causes her to become very weak so her husband, John, takes her to a country home to heal. While at the house she stays in a room that has old yellow wallpaper. Jane is deeply disturbed yet highly intrigued and maintains her deep inspections of the wallpaper as she stays there. Though Jane seemed mostly healthy, her illness takes hold and she ends up believing she had emerged from the wallpaper. John knows Jane has an illness worse than depression and takes every precaution so that when she snaps, his name does not go down with her sanity. Jane struggles severely with her illness and does not really trust her husband when he diagnosed her with a nervous depression. It feels as if John is too persistent of the fact. It feels like John is covering a more ravenous illness that will change her more than depression ever could. Jane writes, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that

She becomes nervous around the wallpaper. Jane’s condition worsens but she does not tell John. She says, “John does not know how much how much I really suffer, and that satisfies him” (2). If he honestly cared about her he would make the incentive to ask her if she was ok and get the true answer from her. Jane also includes that she is left alone for extended amounts of time. Even in John’s claims of caring he is constantly gone and away from the person who he needs to watch after most. Jane writes, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (2). There should be no reason why John would leave her alone in the country in a house she is unnerved by when he I trying to cure her nervous depression. He seems to be contradicting