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Mental Illness In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

1452 Words6 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper Looking at this from a psychological perspective, mental illness was not as well understood as the 19th century was closing which is when the author penned this. What we call mental illnesses today might have just been a nervous condition or Hysteria. Due to the lack of knowledge on various mental illnesses and treatment methods in that era the “rest cure” method introduced by Philadelphia neurologist-psychologist Silas Weir Mitchell intended to remedy an anxious mind for nervous conditions (Kirzner 438). This rest cure may have had the opposite effect which in turn propelled the patient into complete madness or mental breakdown into a total delusional state. The narrator of the story clearly has a pre-existing mental health illness exasperated by pregnancy and child birth. Nervous condition, as which she was diagnosed with, was just a symptom of something more serious. The main character’s husband, John, brings the narrator, Jane, to a hereditary estate for the summer with the intention of her getting rest and regaining her strength and position as a wife and mother. “There is something queer about it” Jane writes about the colonial mansion (Gilman 434). Inscribing …show more content…

John, being the man that he was, knew that the nervous condition she endured was in her head, but little did he know it really was in her head. It wasn’t something she could just turn off. He thought by implementing total rest and taking all care for her she could free her mind and get better but, he forced her to be alone with her eccentric thoughts. She turned to the yellow wallpaper and her journal entries for an outlet. She became fixated and started hallucinating with the pattern in the wallpaper: But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly conspicuous design

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