Mental Illness In Charlotte Perkins Stetson's The Yellow Wallpaper

In the late 1800s not, a lot was known about mental illnesses and due to this the unnamed narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper suffers from this ignorance. The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson in 1891 for the New England Magazine. In the short story, we are introduced to an unnamed woman who seems to be suffering from some sort of mental illness. The narrator’s husband, who is a physician, forces her to do nothing to try and help her condition, but ironically this has the opposite effect on the narrator condition. The narrator is driven slowly mad by a yellow wallpaper in her room which ironically should be helping her condition. The narrator reveals to us the condition a woman is put through during the old ages while also

The reason she has been confined to her bedroom is due to her husband’s request that it will help with her health despite her arguing she should do the opposite. The author wants the reader to sympathize with this narrator as her effort to overcome her husband’s orders. John, the husband, controls her and she has no say in her social life or activities to the point where she is forbidden to even write. In fact, her relationship with her husband leads to him laughing at her whenever she decides to discuss the strangeness of the house (Stetson, 647). The husband does not take his wife seriously and only sees her as a helpless ill patient. It is evident throughout the short story that the narrator’s wants and desires are profoundly impended by her

We see conflict between wife and husband due to the narrator’s husband not really believing she is ill at all. The narrator reveals through her journal that she becomes tired easily and is miserable most of the time. It is quite possible that the narrator suffers from depression and this type of mental illness was not fully understand back then. The author of this short story wrote in an article that she had suffered from somewhat the same condition and she was given the same treatment the narrator was given (Why I Wrote). John, the husband, clearly perceives this illness of his wife as not serious at all and thus does not believe his wife when she argues for different treatment. As it is pointed out in Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper", nineteenth century medicine considered these illnesses as “women’s diseases” and were not taken seriously at all (Treichler 61). The narrator continues to write in her journal and it reveals how serious the situation becomes and how unhealthy her condition as