Mental Deterioration In The Yellow Wallpaper

Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is battling several interwoven conflicts throughout the text. If one of these internal or external struggles been resolved, the conclusion of the short story could have been different from the final mental deterioration at the end.
Conflicts faced by the narrator within “The Yellow Wallpaper” include her declining mental health, her husband’s dismissal and neglect of her concerns about her mental state, and her inability to perform the gender roles assigned to woman living in the early 1900s. The severity of the narrator’s mental state is developed throughout the whole of the story.
At the beginning her condition is described as, “. . .temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency”

John not only is her husband but her physician as well. He prescribes her a treatment plan that she does not agree with, nor believes works. She attempts to combat her illness with “. . .phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and [is] absolutely forbidden to “work” until [she is] well again” (585). The narrator is suffering from a condition that her husband does not fully understand the depth of. He often urges her to rest, condemning her to isolation, which only causes her mental health to further deteriorate. The narrator states, “John does not know how much [she] really [suffers.] He knows there no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (587). Instead of attempting to try to form an understanding of his wife’s suffering, he rather dismisses and belittles her troubles because he believes that she has no reason to suffer. The narrator makes many attempt to appease her husband, following his treatments and advice despite the fact that she was observing a decline in her state of mind rather than increase. The conflict of John’s disbelief in the severity of the her condition is resolved at the conclusion of the short story when he witnesses his wife “. . .creep smoothly on the floor” (596), and fainted signaling his realization that his wife was not “. . .as sick as she pleases” (591), but had succumbed to her illness he never

The narrator feels inadequate after she is unable to perform in the role assigned to her stating, “It does weigh on [her] so not to do [her] duty in any way” (587). She is unable to complete the actions of wife and mother partly because of what she describes as “nervousness” and exhaustion through the story, but also because she is treated like a child by John and her struggles with mental health being viewed as a burden to her caregivers. John even once referred to her as “little girl” when speaking with her about her condition. She is not viewed as capable adult and is therefore stripped of the duties she is expected to perform as a woman. She is demoted from mother and wife to child and burden. Within the text the narrator states that “[She means] to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here [she was] a comparative burden already” (587). Throughout the narration she speaks of how “nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little [she] is able,—to dress and entertain, and order things” (587). She wants to be with her child, however “[she] cannot with him, it makes [her] so nervous”(587). The narrator loses this conflict at the conclusion of the story when she succumbs to the illness that has robbed her of her ability to perform her