Female Hysteria In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” utilizes the context of female hysteria to represent women’s silence during the late nineteenth century. Many critics have read “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a critique of America’s patriarchal society; however, it is also important to focus on the medical context of Gilman’s writing. Although the medical community can be seen as a branch of a patriarchal society, the effects from just the medical community alone are so profound that they must be studied separately. Within “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the diagnostic and treatment elements of the narrator’s experience offer insights into the damaging effects of silencing women. When women’s opinions are ignored, and they are offered damaging treatments, women are unfairly forced to continue to suffer.

In the final scene of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the text shifts to a dialogue, rather than the previous diary entry writing style, and the narrator is seen circling the nursery and identifying with the woman within the wallpaper (591). With the switch in narrative format, the reader can understand that a significant shift has occurred, and it seems logical that with this shift, the narrator has fully slipped into madness. Additionally, because the previous narrative format was composed of diary entries, the narrator was able to mentally process and describe her lifestyle. But, with her descent into madness, she loses mental clarity. Although the last scene of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written from a first-person perspective, which is consistent with the diary entries, the combination of the shift to dialogue and the narrator’s actions suggest that the narrator has lost her grip on reality. By refusing to listen to the narrator’s opinions, her doctors have broken their Hippocratic oath as the narrator ultimately descends into