Mental Health In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Fiona Clifford-Fotopoulos

Principles of Literary Analysis Honors

Ms. Crawley

3/17/23

The Impact of Gender on Mental Health within The Yellow Wallpaper

Death, illness, and insanity plague the minds of people across the globe, no matter their race, gender, background, or identity. The raw and human phobia of losing yourself to your own mind is a sickness in itself, which is something that people still, and perhaps always will, struggle to fully understand. This concept is showcased beautifully in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper and her interpretation of anxiety and delusion is jarring and purely eerie for readers. However, the topic of mental health does not reveal itself unscathed from judgment and classification,

If a particularly highly-stated individual was feeling ill or disturbed, they would be prescribed a sort of vacation and getaway to do nothing but sit, rest, and heal. This method, however, was seldom used for men, but rather for women who were experiencing symptoms of various ailments. Though, it seems as though sickness was not the sole rationale for these periods of leisure; in this time, a woman who had any unconventional, idiosyncratic, or presumed bizarre thoughts or actions would be considered sick. The American Journal of Psychiatry affirms that the rest cure “was prescribed almost exclusively for women,” at this time (Martin). The pigeonhole of a quiet, complacent wife and mother was a tautly-bound noose that was impossible to free oneself from. A woman that merely did not want to cook dinner or had frustrations with her husband would be ‘diagnosed’ with mild anxiety, depression, or hysteria and shepherded away to lay down and get some rest or air. It is said that S. Weir Mitchell, the inventor of the rest cure, believed that “‘brain work’ … imposed nervous strain and might interfere with ‘womanly duties’” (Martin). The concept of these so-called ‘womanly duties’ was severely nuanced, however; considering how it was thought to be a “small step for doctors to declare that any woman who rejected her submissive, domestic role (as) medically impaired” (Moore). With the

Finding something she can feel strongly about, that she understands fully, is something that she has been denied all of her life, and it becomes an addiction. As she becomes more and more dependent on loathing the wallpaper, her desperation is mistaken by her husband and Jennie as motivation and they begin to see it as an improvement. As they continue to refuse to attempt an understanding of the woman, she grows restless and begins hallucinating further. Seeing the wall move, seeing a woman moving in the patterns. She recognizes the image of a woman “skulk(ing) about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 4). This ‘woman’ is her once again seeing herself reflected in the wall, showcasing her self-loathing and desperation to escape the confines of the life she is bound to. As the story pushes on, the woman falls behind. Her descriptions of the wallpaper become more in-depth and kaleidoscopic, her mind unraveling right in front of the reader’s eyes. By the end of the story, she has lost her identity and confused herself for the woman she has been seeing creeping through the walls. Had she been taken seriously by her husband, she wouldn’t be this deep into her depression and psychosis. Had she been treated as an adult, and not a child, she would be improving. Had she been considered with the respect that