Intellectual Relief In The Yellow Wallpaper

Intellectual Relief in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” The Yellow Wallpaper presents the story of a woman’s descent into madness. The narrator’s declining mental health is reflected through the characteristics of the house she is dwells in and her husband, while trying to protect her, is actually damaging her. The narrator of the story goes with her husband to stay in a colonial mansion for the summer. The house is supposed to be a place where she can recover from postpartum depression. The story is told from a first person perspective, as the narrator writes within her journal, while she is “absolutely forbidden” to write or work (Gilman 1). Her husband John, attempts to cure his wife with the help of the rest cure, which was a popular way of treating mental disorders in the nineteen century, and therefore implores his wife to rest, and to stop writing. Staying in a room which is covered with an old and stale yellow wallpaper, the narrator begins to develop relevance toward the wallpaper. Naming it “the paper,” the narrator’s fascination with it is the first clue of her degenerating sanity (Gilman

The narrator attempts to release the alleged woman from the wallpaper, can be understood as the narrator’s attempt to release herself and express her imagination. We see that the narrator is an imaginative, highly expressive woman. She remembers her peculiar imagination as a child. Yet as part of her cure, her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her reason and her emotions boil, and she turns her imagination onto the seemingly neutral object—the wallpaper—in an attempt to ignore her growing frustration. Her negative feelings color her description of her surroundings, making them seem uncanny and sinister, and she eventually becomes fixated on the