Mental Illness In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is suffering from some sort of mental illness. She has a recurring type of nervous depression. Her husband, John, tells her that she is fine and must rest. They went to a summer house where the narrator is forced to stay upstairs in their room until she gets better, but there is a disturbing wallpaper in the room that the narrator can not get over. Little does the husband know, but the wallpaper is driving his wife into more madness. The woman begins to see herself trapped in the wallpaper, and she eventually has a mental breakdown where she rips the paper off of the wall in order to free herself. This comes as a shock to the husband because he faints at the sight of

At this time, women were not allowed to vote.They were expected to get married at a young age and produce children. Many women were housewives, but if needed to work they would teach, nurse, or clean. It was just then that it was popular for women to be educated. This way of life and thinking towards women had an effect on the story. The husband thought this way towards his wife. Whenever the narrator tells John that she is sick, he does not believe her. “John laughs at me” (Gilman 655). John was a doctor, but he felt no sense in treating her because he thought that she did not know what she was talking about. When John decided this, there was nothing that the narrator could do. “Women then, became professional patients. They lost not only their control over the diagnosis of their own illness, but also their control over the prescriptions” (Kautz 82). Also, she had a friend who had a similar issue, but every doctor she met with all turned her away thinking nothing was wrong. At this point, she had to listen and obey anything type of help he

In society today, it is deemed terrible what he did, but due to the way the world thought back then it seems appropriate. During this time period, the husband makes the decision in the marriage; the wife respects any decision he made even if she did not agree with it. John prescribes her with basic medicine and will not allow her to work. He leaves her in the house all day and she stays in the bedroom. Here she looks out the window and sees all the people and even sees her husband walking. She writes down her thoughts, but quickly her husband tells her to stop writing because John thinks “that with her imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies” (Gilman 658). Since she is forced to stay in her room, the narrator quickly becomes obsessed with wallpaper and begins to see a women trapped in the paper. This eventually drives her over the edge and causes her to rip off the paper. By ripping off the paper, this releases a sort of “demon” inside of her that has caused this